Welcome to our BRAND-NEW monthly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!

In this episode Gogo discusses how agents in Michigan have had to improvise during this period to continue their work in real estate. She points out how they even had to rely on sellers for photos and videos of property and work through all the stages of business virtually. She also discusses how important it is to reach out to your clients to just be there for them during this difficult period and try to help them with any real estate related issues.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

DISCLAIMER: Gogo’s 30-day moneyback guarantee is no longer available.

Gogo Bethke can be reached at gogosrealestate@gmail.com and at her Instagram account.

Purchase Gogo’s Bootcamp by clicking here – Keeping It Real Podcast listeners get a discount!

Gogo's Bootcamp 2.0

Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the best social media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level. She’s so confident there’s a 30 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount so please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount and now on with the show

Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And today we have our monthly feature which called Social bootcamp with gogo bath key now if you’re new to the show, and haven’t ever listened to this monthly series that we have with gogo, let me tell you a little bit about her. Go go back he came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream. She was broke, she had no sphere of influence, no experience barely spoke English, and when only $6 to her name, which left her with nothing else but Facebook to build her real estate business. And that’s where she started she created gogos real estate and her real estate career began. Now with the power of social media, Google has sold over 45 million in residential real estate transactions. She shares the good the bad and the ugly side of real estate and are honest snippets in her everyday life. I’ve gotten her 10s of 1000s of social media followers in the real estate community and she has earned the income sorry, not the income the nickname the social media queen. She has also earned income of course, after being asked to present at various realtor events. Go go build a social media Bootcamp for realtors called gogos bootcamp. Now today she has a team of over 130 Real estate agents all over the country and is growing every day. Now her goal is to help as many agents as possible. Make a name for themselves in real estate and if she can do it, a girl from Transylvania Romania with no US education, no sphere of influence, no money and no experience. And with an accent that you can do it as well. We’re going to ask everyone right now to pause this and go find gogo on Instagram at Gogo realistics, our gogos real estate geo gos real estate, and we’ll also be posting a link to it here. Also, we highly, highly, highly, highly remember, recommend signing up for Go Go’s Bootcamp for our listeners, we have a special website set up with a discount, please visit Gogo podcast.com. That’s geo geo podcast.com. And once again, welcome gogo to the show.

Gogo Bethke 3:09
Thank you for having me. Highlight on my mind.

D.J. Paris 3:13
What I’m sorry, saying what was that

Gogo Bethke 3:15
highlight of my month?

D.J. Paris 3:16
Oh, that’s so sweet.

Gogo Bethke 3:17
We look forward to talking to you every month.

D.J. Paris 3:21
Go go and I are we’re struggling a little bit today. And so we are we are bringing it because it’s I don’t know if it’s like what it’s like in Michigan right now. It is beautiful outside here in Illinois. It’s in the 60s. And it is to that point of the day where I’m looking outside. I haven’t got to spend a lot of time outside you probably haven’t either. And I just want to go outside and enjoy the sunshine. i What’s it like in Michigan right now?

Gogo Bethke 3:46
I seem I mean, we had the you know, in the 20s the last few days it actually snowed and all that and finally came up to it was supposed to be 57 today, so we were so excited. And I did get a chance to sit on the deck for like 20 minutes i and it’s not that warm, like it looks sunny, but it’s pretty cold. So I ended up coming back inside. But yeah, I had a 10 o’clock podcast and 11 o’clock live and then now I’m here with you again, on a podcast. So I don’t see much of the outside either. And even during this COVID I feel like I have been so busy. You. Yeah, I’m

D.J. Paris 4:19
doing just as much work as I did. I’m actually going into the office, we’re my boss and I are here just because checks come in and we have to deposit them and but I mean really I’m just as busy as ever. I would be at home if I didn’t have to, you know, pick up checks and things but it’s it’s amazing that, you know, all the realtors I’ve interviewed, the top producers like yourself are all staying pretty busy, you know whether they’re running a team or if it’s just their own private practice. I wanted to ask you because I we were talking about this just before we started. I was it’s easy to get really emotional about it. And this is about social media engagement. So I was telling gogo before we started that the, that our listenership is has grown, which we’re grateful for every month that grows a bit, and it grew from last month. And the reason I was checking it, I really don’t look at it very often, because it really sort of, it’s nice to see, but it doesn’t really matter. We’re just going to keep doing this even even if we only have one listener, we’re gonna keep putting out episodes. Thankfully, we keep getting more, but the one thing that has gone down, thankfully not the listenership, but our engagement on Facebook. So even though we’re doing the same exact type of posts, that we’ve done in the past that have got pretty decent responses, likes, comments, shares it, we’re just not seeing it. We know people are listening. But we don’t see a lot of engagement on Facebook. And I was curious if you’re seeing any of that same activity or lack of activity in your own business.

Gogo Bethke 5:51
Absolutely. Something is definitely I feel like and yeah, and this is my opinion, I’m no scientist of Facebook. But definitely something going on with Facebook, same on mine, the activity for so I put everything on Instagram, I automatically feed it over to Facebook. So it’s the same exact post, same image, same time of the day, same blah, blah, blah, it automatically goes over there. And Instagram, I might get hundreds, if not 1000s of likes and hundreds of comments. And on Instagram, or on Facebook, I’ll get 35 likes and three comments. Yeah, same exact post, same exact everything, same time of the day, everything is the same. So I think is Facebook has definitely limited us. And our followers of what they’re going to see they I understand they want us to pay because it’s a business page, they want us to throw money at it. The part of that kind of frustrates me as I was telling you, it’s not that I don’t want to throw money at it. If I want to reach people that they didn’t want to be opt in, they didn’t already choose to follow me. If I want to reach those people, I understand I have to pay for it. Because they don’t know of my existence. It’s advertising. Yeah, it’s advertising, Facebook is going to push me to make sure that that person is going to see my account in hopes that they’re going to follow me. Okay, but with the ones that already follow me, the ones that already opted in, who knows seven years ago, the fact that they don’t show them my post, unless I give money to them. That’s annoying, that is not cool. I already own that I work hard for that those people opted in to follow me. I give them a reason to I post, I’m consistent, I share knowledge. I’m the expert. So I get annoyed by having to pay. So Instagram seems to be working much better at these times. LinkedIn is working very good at this time. So I would probably concentrate more so your energy over there unless you want to throw money at it. Just kind of know I mean, have a presence on Facebook, feed everything over there like that just kind of be there have an existence until Facebook figures out what’s going on and figure out their algorithm and allows us to do more than what they’re truly allowed allowing us to do now.

D.J. Paris 8:04
Yeah, I have a thought about Facebook, which is just as I’ve gotten older, I plan all of our high school reunions, I’m the guy that plans the high school reunion, which is like the most thankless job, but I like doing it but it is a lot of work. But what’s funny is so I we do it through Facebook. I mean, we do it through other ways, too. But that seems to be the easiest way to get in touch with everyone for my class. I’m 43. So we just had our 25th anniversary last year anyway, makes me feel old. But regardless,

Gogo Bethke 8:34
I mean, I’m 20 this year, so you’re good.

D.J. Paris 8:38
You’ll Yeah, you’re not you won’t be old for another five years. And I’m teasing. I don’t feel old at all. But but it is funny. Because as as you know, and I’m again, I’m 43. So as people my age, it’s seeing I see their, their posts on Facebook, much less. I think they’re posting much less as well. I think they’re not participating on Facebook as much. And I’m also wondering, maybe that’s the reason why engagements down less activity, Facebook, you know, obviously that that,

Gogo Bethke 9:09
for me, it seems like on the personal side, there’s plenty of activity, there’s plenty of people posting, you know, memes and political things, and this and that and what they’re doing at home and what are they eating, and you know, how the homeschooling is going like their parenting thing, and they are getting a lot of activity on there. So that’s why I’m thinking is the algorithm on the business page side that is tapping our posts, they’re just not getting even the view. It’s just not even showing up in their feeds.

D.J. Paris 9:35
Yeah, well, they know that the average non, you know, a personal person, you know, a personal account is likely not going to spend money, right, a business account is 1000 times more likely to promote a post for $15. So who knows? But yeah, so I guess the point we’re making is if you’re seeing lower engagement on Facebook, you’re not alone on your business pages, doesn’t mean you should stop posting in fact, may Maybe you should even post more not necessarily, you know more unless it’s great content. But just understand that you know, ebbs and flows.

Gogo Bethke 10:07
Yeah, and then periodically share it back over to your personal page, so then your personal friends can see it. And that will generate you more traffic back to your page. And I just think like Facebook, maybe have gone a little bit wrong with making it so strict, because if at least they let us to have access to half of our people, then at least I know, okay, I know why I do this, I know I’m paying you 10 bucks, is to get that action, that correspondence on my post. But if my post is right now, at two likes, I’m gonna give you 10 bucks, I can get to

D.J. Paris 10:38

  1. Right. You’re right in I have a I have a quick tip for everyone. This has worked really well for us on our keeping it real podcast page on Facebook, whenever anyone likes a post, especially if it’s shared, right. So if it’s shared, if you’re going to buy someone else, you’re obviously going to get access to some of their followers who might engage with the content. So if you are getting likes, you should invite all of those people, Facebook makes it really easy to invite them to like your page, you know, when you create the page, you can send a mass one out to everyone in your contact list. But I love the people that like I find that about a third to a half of them will actually end up liking your page, because they’ve already liked a piece of content, you just hit that invite button takes two seconds, and it sends it to him. So if you’re not doing that on Facebook, you absolutely should. And ask you ask the people who follow you to share your content, say, Hey, if you found this valuable, please, please send it to someone else. And

Gogo Bethke 11:39
yeah, yes, no, that’s a great idea. And in order to do that, the way you find that, as you go to the Word says how many people like that, if it says, you know, 56 people, like you’re gonna click that number 56, it’s going to give you a list, it’s going to show you everybody who is not following the page, but liked that post. So then you’re going to invite them to follow the page.

D.J. Paris 11:57
Yeah, it’s a great suggestion. It’s easy to forget to do that. Because then you’ve already maybe you’ve already done four more posts. And then somebody goes back and likes something five posts ago. So you have to go back through your feed, just do it once or twice a week, go to everything you posted, look like it’s bogus. And click on the on the the number of likes link, and it’ll show you everyone it really, really quickly shows you just click a button, you can do it in two seconds and move on. And you’ll find a lot of those people end up liking your page. I wanted to also ask you about just in general, you’re in you’re in Michigan, real estate is a non essential in that state as of today. Hopefully that changes for you guys shortly. But a lot of states it’s that way a here in Illinois, we’re thankfully able to still practice working were deemed essential, but it’s different everywhere in the country. What are you doing? Or what are you seeing agents doing to just to stay busy being that you can’t go to showings? You know, you can’t go to closings? I mean, or you can but it’s real tricky. How, what do you say?

Gogo Bethke 12:58
So it has, we have to improvise a lot on both sides of the transaction. So on the buying side, we’re not allowed to show houses. So buyers are making offers pretty much sight unseen. I cannot take them to the property, but the inspector can. So that doesn’t make sense when they’re doing the action. So they get the offer accepted, sight unseen. And then when they do the home inspection is when the buyer gets to go with the inspector and actually see the home for the first time. So I’m like that, that doesn’t make much sense. But you know, it is what it is. So they can do that. We are actually having a six o’clock online virtual interviewing process. So a buyer is interviewing us to see if it would be a good fit to be the realtor. And they’re coming from out of state actually come in from Chicago. I think about it. Yeah. So that’s different. Like that’s my first First of all, I’ve never interviewed for a buyer realtor. So that’s a first, but I’ve certainly never done it on Zoom. So that is going to be different. So the things that you can do now is to fill up the pipeline. I don’t know if you knew this, but you can create a Calendly link give access to people to your character. So you can say hey, I’m doing lesson side presentations Monday, Wednesday, Friday from six to eight because bad. I’m doing buyside presentation tuesday thursday Saturdays from 11 to one because and then that way they plug themselves into your calendar. Now you can do these zoom calls with them. See ahead of times if you will be a good fit. So then finally, when the time comes around, you already have your pipeline built so that’s one way of you know, do it from home. Facebook also allows you to set up appointments in there so you can do listing appointments and biocide appointments right in your Facebook business page calendar and then just give people access to that and just make a post about it. Say hey guys, I know we are not essential which means I am not able to leave my house but that doesn’t mean that I cannot work real estate. I can do everything that I can do virtually. So we are doing listen side by side, you know presentations and pick a spot. Here’s my calendar. I can’t wait to be a realtor and just kind And then leave it up to them to pick a spot in your calendar. So then on the listing side, we had to improvise a lot. So listing presentations were chose. So we are having a conversation just like this. Most of them are my friends or they know me that I’m in the industry for a long time. So I’m not interviewing for the job. But I still have to explain them the process of what it’s going to take, and especially now with how is it different with COVID. So we are still listing even though we are not able to actually go out and see the property. So we don’t have yard signs, we don’t have like boxes, I can take measurements, none of that we have to take previous listing measurements. While we are doing for the pictures and the videos, we’re actually asking our sellers to take iPhone photos, which I’ve been preaching forever since I had a license don’t ever always hire a professional. Now I have to I don’t have any other option because I am not allowed to schedule a photographer to go out to the property. So the sellers have to take the photos, but what we do, they send it back to us. And then our VA Oh, the photographer will edit them just depending how what the quality of the pictures are. We’ll edit those also our sellers are doing virtual tours. So we asked the sellers to create one nice walkthrough of the property and just kind of look at it from the eye of the buyer. What would they want to see if they were buying this home? What questions would they want to have answered? So as they’re walking through the kitchen, for example, they can say you know, they’re all stainless steel matching appliances are less than five years old. All are saying with the property, you know, this is a pullout pantry, this is a blah, blah, blah, the kitchen sink has a grinder the trash compactor, blah, blah, kind of just like walking through as if they were buying a home virtually. And if they had the questions, make sure to answer them. So they’re doing that we’re uploading those to YouTube and and turning them into like a professional virtual tour. And then including those links with a text code with our smart phone number, where people can just text our smart phone number or code like you know, 4040 and then they are going to get the virtual tour in return. So a lot of improvisation and closing on Friday. Know that that is a whole other trying to figure it out our title companies will not allow, if the seller and the buyer have their own title company, neither title company allows the other party to close at their place unless that title company is closing them. So now we have to have totally separate closings. Because buyers and sellers close at a different time, not even at the same time. Even if they are with the same title company, they don’t want them in the same room. Now there are two times that we need. So we can just have a 12 o’clock, the 12 o’clock window. Now we have to have a 12 and the 11 or the 12 and the one for for both parties. So it’s just or if they have multiple rooms, they have to put multiple, multiple rooms so we can not be there. The closing my best to represent my client is via zoom if they allow me to do that. So yeah, we had to improvise a lot.

D.J. Paris 17:48
Yeah, I am. I wanted to ask your opinion about this, because I was thinking about this recently that we are all now hooked on video conferencing, specifically Zoom is kind of the, you know, the big one of the day, who knows if zoom will be as popular in the future, but there will be video conferencing. And I really think that even when everything returns to normal, this is going to be the norm of it, especially with people you haven’t not with your clients. Yes, you won’t need to do this as often, although you certainly can. But I really think that this will become whereas in the past, if you were meeting with a client, a listing presentation, maybe or a buyer who you’ve never met before, maybe you’d meet them at your office or at a Starbucks or someplace neutral and safe. I think now that’s all going to happen here. And go you were saying this on the last time we did an episode, which was to say now’s the time to get more comfortable being on camera. It doesn’t mean you have to perform. But to realize that this is the new normal and yes, eventually we’ll all go back to our regular lives in the regular ways we’ve done things but I think this is here to stay. I was curious to get your your thoughts on it.

Gogo Bethke 19:03
I think both I think is definitely the question is not if it’s here to stay, I think it is here and it is staying. It’s not going anywhere. In many occasions. It’s amazing. Like especially when you have out of state clients who have the ability to meet face to face like this. Prior to deciding if you want to work with one another. It’s awesome. So it’s definitely here to stay but I do think that we outstayed our welcome and zoom. left six weeks. So I feel like when we get released, but at least me and I don’t I can’t talk for everyone but I am excited to be up in people’s business in the personal space. Yeah, I’m excited to hug people. I’m excited to be in the same room. I am excited to you know, do all that just shake hand. You know, I mean, like I cannot wait to be back to that. So I’m not gonna hop on the Zoom unless I absolutely have to write I’m excited to meet someone in a coffee shop.

D.J. Paris 19:52
Yeah, I just think it’s going to be great for a lot of people have phone anxiety, right. A lot of realtors think they should pick up The phone and they don’t right this is ever since people have had telephones and there’s been sales type positions, there’s they call phone phobia or phone anxiety. And now it’s so it’s so cool because you can actually do that via video conferencing. And it is a more intimate and connected experience, even though you know, you’re still miles away and maybe hundreds of miles or 1000s of miles away, you’re able to at least see somebody. So I think that for a lot of us, this is a you were talking about this before we started recording. But what a great time it is to reach out to your clients. Obviously, right now is not the time to go, Hey, do you know of any other buyers or sellers that could benefit from my services, that’s probably not the best timing for that kind of, but it is great timing, to have face to face conversations with people who are stuck at home and are maybe lonely and starved for some human attention. And they’re not going to be able to get that hug today. But they can get you know, at least a virtual hug through through this video conferencing.

Gogo Bethke 21:01
Yes. And yes, I totally agree with you. It is not the time to be asking for business, it is the time to help one another. I think it is the time to reach out to your sphere of influence your past clients or people that you know you have in your database to see how you’re doing. Do they need help? Is there anything that you can do for them in the previous market crashes? Or the last one especially there was no equity people didn’t have equity and the biggest problem now 70 to 80% of the people have equity in their home. And most may not even understand that they could tap into that. If they were having a financial hardship right now maybe they don’t qualify for the stimulus package package. Maybe they don’t qualify for unemployment employment, and they just don’t know where the money is going to come from. If they have equity in their home, they could potentially tap into that. And they could take that money out and float themselves in the summer. Maybe just have that cushion to know that I have a Friday that. And yeah, would you benefit from that? No, because you’re not going to make a commission off of that. But here is your time to help. So you can call them see if they need their help. If they say that, yeah, you know what, that might be a great idea for us, you might be able to use that money, then you can say hey, I’ll run a quick CMA. What is the address of your property, I’ll tell you what I think it’s approximately bought today on the market, then minus what you owe on it is your equity. Now, if there’s a number that you’re happy with that like yep, you have some equity, then I can also recommend some of the lenders and I’ve worked with through the years and I would recommend for you to call them now give them that vendor list or lenders list, have them make that phone call from that moment your job is done. Done. So said the lender is going to take it over if they qualify. If they’re able to get a HELOC or or an equity line, then, you know, they can take it from there and you help them out you will at least help them how much your home is approximately aboard, they will still have to do an appraisal and all that but at least they will know. Yeah, we have equity Oh no, we don’t. And you have them. So next time when they do need a realtor who would they call Who else but you because you wanted to have them at a time of need?

D.J. Paris 23:02
Well, and just think you know, you’re so right. And think about how many other professionals you have in your life that you pay fees to on a regular basis. How often do any of those professionals reach out proactively and say, I was just thinking about you. I wanted to see number one how you’re doing. And I also had this thought just to float it by you to see if it might ring true for your current situation. Hey, by the way, just in case you didn’t know rates are at an all time low. So you know what some folks are doing who are who you know, are looking for cash opportunities is they refinance. And you know, anyway, just thought I you know, I’ll shoot you an email about it. But anyway, that’s providing tremendous value to people right now. And you know, you need to do it in a very delicate and considerate way. But by having those conversations you’re you are going to be as as gogo, you just said you’re going to be in some ways, very heroic to them. And you’re you’re not benefiting directly, but you’re

Gogo Bethke 23:59
actually working for absolutely nothing because you still have to run that CMA is still gonna take you some time you’re investing time for that initial call, you’re investing time to caring about them, you invest in time when you’re creating a CMA and emailing get back over to him. You invest in time and effort by sharing the connections that you made through your career with all those lenders that you’re going to provide their information to them. So you’re investing some time but you investing it with the hope that you will earn their business in return one day,

D.J. Paris 24:25
and you’re just demonstrating care and compassion. And I can assure you that the vast majority of the people that they pay professional service fees to at some point are not doing right, you know, is their attorney is the attorney who did their will reaching out to them. Probably not right is is the fight is the insurance agent reaching out to them? Probably not. You know, who knows the dentist reaching out? Probably not. These are opportunities for you to be one of the few people in their life that demonstrates that you care and that just pays a multitude in return. If it doesn’t pay today, but it will pay tomorrow in business and referrals, it’s a really a no brainer.

Gogo Bethke 25:07
Exactly. Exactly. And who knows, some might have to sell you and I mean, but that you just didn’t just shouldn’t start a conversation with that, in my opinion, not at the time of what’s going on right now.

D.J. Paris 25:18
Yeah, what, back to social media. Because obviously, your bootcamp is amazing because it teaches realtors, step by step A to Z, how to, you know, create a powerful social media presence so that you can attract, you know, of course, more followers and then build a more real estate business as a result. What are you telling your your bootcamp followers right now, what are some of the, you know, is there anything in particular that’s really working as far as just keeping Realtors busy on social media so that they’re able to produce content that the clients are and that their followers are interested in?

Gogo Bethke 25:56
Yeah, I think it’s sharing the knowledge is very important. So if you learn something about the real estate industry that applies to your area, definitely just create a quick video about it, you don’t have to know all of the answers, you might just say, you know, what, not just released an article about blah, blah, blah, you can read the article repeated what you just read, and then include the attachment as article so they can follow up with that, but by just sharing what’s going on, and that people can follow along the ones that do have a care about the real estate industry, because not everybody does. But if they do they have something, you provided them information, which in return is going to just automatically make you the local expert, because you’re sharing that information. So I think that’s very important. Also, in the last episode, we talked about using this time to gather reviews and feedbacks, because when we are selling, we are too busy. We don’t have the time to make sure we have the five stars everywhere. Or even that you have a Google My Business presence, you might not even have it set up. So I think this time is very important to do that. Also, this time is very important to figure out the things I usually don’t have time to do. So if social media was the one that hey, I want to figure it out. It’s not going to take two minutes, it took me I’m 10 years in, you know, I mean, that’s what everybody wants, like, what can I do today? Well, I wish I could teach you everything I learned the last 10 years in one day. But again, it’s going to take time. So if you want social media to be your breadwinner, then you’re going to have to put some time in because in life, everything is like that in order to take money out, I always call it an ATM in order to take money out, you’re gonna have to take time, you have to put time in and you have to put effort. And so same thing with social media. So I think this is a perfect time to sit down. I mean, yeah, my bootcamp, I totally recommend that but it’s not two minutes long. It’s I mean, we’re coming out with finance tupuna. Right now, finance alone is 108 videos. You know, I mean, so I can’t teach you Facebook ads in one video, I can teach you organic social media in one video, I wish I could. But if it was that simple, then everybody would be an influencer? No, I mean, so in order for me to teach you everything, how to have millions and imprints and how to get leads, and never have to buy when and how to build a brand organically without spending money, it’s going to take some time. So my bootcamp is probably at least 30 hours of video content. So if you want to figure this out, this is the perfect time because you have not been asked to do but sit on the couch and decide, okay, I’ll get four hours in today, four hours in tomorrow. And as you’re going along, the whole point is to get all those steps done. So when I’m talking about a CRM program, and automated drip campaigns and the buy side and listing side and, and holiday drip campaigns, then you make sure that yours are set up in your CRM program, you make sure that you have a CRM program, you make sure that all of your contacts are uploaded and they are tagged properly. And if they don’t have a tag, you’re like, oh, shoot, I don’t have a tag then you’re gonna go in, you’re gonna go through those and you’re gonna say, okay, this person closed on 123 Main Street or representing the seller, okay, I’m gonna hashtag seller, this person on this street. Oh, they I was on the buy side. Okay, I’m gonna tag them buyers. Because when you tag these things in your database, then you can automatically just send them an email, then you’re not sending it to everybody, who’s your aunt and uncle and cousin and a buyer and the seller and the renter if it doesn’t apply to them. So if I’m talking about how much your home is worth, I’m not going to talk to a buyer who’s searching for one right now that’s currently homeless. Right? Yeah, I mean, so by tagging them so all of this is I teach you everything literally how I how I built everything from zero to wear goggles real estate is today, but I can do that in an hour. So the bootcamp is hours and hours and hours you’ll get lifetime access. So we actually will be dead though. We broke it down we used to have an upfront cost for it only and and I understand times are hard. So we change that now they can do upfront if you can afford it, you can do an upfront cost you have lifetime access, which means everything that we come out with not only everything that’s already created as yours, but everything we come out is just automatically going to be included. Because Instagram changes algorithm every five minutes so I have to click on your video because things that were worked last year it doesn’t work this year, just like we are talking about why is Facebook so slow? I don’t know. When it’s time to kind of take it easy on it until Facebook figures it out. Um So what we did is we broke it up into monthly payments. So now it’s for small monthly payments. And your your customers actually get a 10% discount your listeners. So they get a better prices, they just go to your, to your page. But yeah, so we try to adjust it, you know, I mean, there’s times are changing, I always put a new content, I try to adjust the price, so it’s easier for everybody to afford. But this is the time if you see you are serious about social media and you want to build a brand and you want to be able what I call to fish. My goal is to teach you how to fish not to give you a fish. So it’s not about me giving you a lead. It’s about me teaching you how to go and find one how to have them reach out to you.

D.J. Paris 30:39
Yeah, now now’s the time to remember that as real estate agents, you know, you this is a business and it is your business. And now you know, yeah, you have to you have to work on the processes, now’s the time to work on process. And you know, for when you’re in the middle of the busy season, you don’t have time to study social media platforms and to, you know, create posts for Google My Business by the way, everybody should be have a Google My Business account and should be creating posts every single week. It’s simple. It’s easy, it’s quick, but the point is you might go well, I don’t normally have the time to do that you do now. And so now’s the time to invest in something like Go Go’s bootcamp. We’re doing this as a company My boss asked all of us in management, there’s nine of us to find a some sort of, you know, course that we wanted to take and we all chose different courses. And we’re all doubling down on our efforts to because now’s the time to develop those skill sets those things that when you’re in the middle of running your business, you just don’t have the time to do so now’s the time,

Gogo Bethke 31:48
I always want to figure out stocks I’ve never had the time. So I figured okay, well, perfect time market crashed, stocks are at the bottom. So I can buy now, five stocks with a price of one. And it’s a perfect time to kind of figure it out. So I decided to learn how to stack trade while the downtime I decided to read books I do. Or I started my own podcast, I added we added 108 I think videos to the bootcamp I added personally to the organic side, God knows how many, so it’s just like I am working. I’m busier than ever.

D.J. Paris 32:16
Yeah, yeah, me to work. It’s it’s funny that you know, this is and it doesn’t, you know, you’re busy and just a different way. And now it’s it’s just this is the time to invest in yourself. And it’s in, invest in your customers that invent invest in the people that put their faith into you. And that allowed you to sell them a home five years ago, reach back out, see how they’re doing, you know, even if you haven’t reached out in five years, reach out now and say, you know, I haven’t I haven’t checked in on in a while I want to check in now how are you? And just keep it to that. And you know, anyway, develop your skills. Do that, because when it gets busy again, and it will, and hopefully sooner rather than later, you’re not going to have this time anymore. It’ll just go away. And we’ll all be busy. busier than then than we, then we are maybe right now. So now’s the time. And just for our listeners, as gogo was mentioning, if you want to invest in gogos boot camp, and we could not recommend it more highly. I’ve always felt that that is never a bad investment, to have to purchase something where you can learn how to grow your business, right? That is a no brainer. I will spend money all day long on that. And now she’s got additional payment options for people that are you know, struggling financially. So that’s even amazing as well. So go to Gogo podcast.com to get that special discount again. Go go podcast.com. But go go. I think we had a great episode here. I think we talked a lot about, you know, the attitudes that realtors can take right now and some steps specifically about how to just keep going and hopefully in staying positive through challenging times.

Gogo Bethke 33:58
Absolutely. You have to adjust to the times. I mean real estate especially is such a quickly changing industry. When it comes to technology, especially of like, just think about it. I didn’t even know what that live was when I got my license nine years ago. I mean, I wouldn’t know what to do without it right now. You know, like I get paid at the closing table. I take a picture of my check and that’s how I get paid. Are you kidding me? Yeah, you know what I mean? So it’s like you have to We are constantly adjusting and it just kind of prepares us to whatever life throws at us we just adjust you just figure it out. Oh, I’m not essential. Okay, I’ll figure out how I can list a home how I can sell a home how I can market a home how I can get to the closing table without ever leaving my house.

D.J. Paris 34:38
Yeah, and and how you can develop additional skills in between all of those things. By you know, taking courses like like Go Go’s boot camp or reading books or going to seminars or you know, virtual seminars. I took a yoga class yesterday. I am not a yoga person. I did yoga yesterday. How did you like it? Well, I am I am tall as you You know, and I have never been able to touch my toes, like with my without bending. And so I still, that is like never going to happen. But so I’m super inflexible. So that was really hard. But I enjoyed it because it was physical. And, you know, it centered me

Gogo Bethke 35:17
about it grateful to mine the very first time I’m from Eastern Europe, we don’t do yoga in Eastern Europe. And the first time I went to a yoga class by accident, because I thought it was like an Arabic class or something. And I got there an hour early or something. I was like, oh, shoot, I’m in a yoga class. I didn’t want to walk out like 10 minutes and realizing it’s a yoga class. So I sat through it, oh, my gosh, I was so sore today. After I literally got in the car, I have to pick up my leg and pull it in the car because I couldn’t lift it up. I’ve never been so sore in my life. And, and I realized it’s great for the mind, especially at the very end. I always fall asleep when they were like, Okay, it’s like a three minute meditation. And they’re like, Hey, go, go, go go beyond all leaving. I just knocked myself out. I don’t know. I just I learn to love it.

D.J. Paris 36:01
Yeah, and not again, a new skill, right? This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. And I never found the time I never carved it out. Could I have carved it out? Sure I could have but I didn’t. But now I have less of an excuse. So now’s the time to develop those skills. Try the things that you know are good for you develop those morning rituals, develop those social media rituals that you’re like, I know, I should be posting more. But I’m not I know I should be connecting more with my sphere of influence on social media. But I’m not. I know I should friend everyone on LinkedIn that isn’t my sphere, but I never did. Now’s the time because when everything goes back to normal, that’s when the dividends will pay themselves. And all of a sudden you’ll have client upon client upon client that will remember that you were there for them during this time. And that you were you weren’t hiding away in a bunker even though you were away in a bunker. You were still present and active. So So yeah, I think that’s that’s our matchmaker, think

Gogo Bethke 36:57
about a New York perfect example, you’re not allowed to cold call. I know how it says we’re not essentially Michigan, there’s the list of things I’m not allowed to do is very long, pretty much the only things that it allows me to do is social media.

D.J. Paris 37:11
Yeah, it’s funny, right after I’m done, we’re done here. I’m going to be talking to a broker in New York who has a firm of about 400 agents. We’re friendly. So we’re just checking in seeing how he’s doing. But yes, there’s he he can’t cold call brokers to come work at his firm, his brokers cannot cold call a client’s all of that has gone away. And remember, yeah, and so now we’re all adjusting, we’re trying different things. We’re developing other skills, so that when this all goes back to normal, those skills will remain. And hopefully, some of those habits will stick. So we could not recommend more highly. Are you sick of paying for leads or not being able to afford to pay for leads, or just going I know, I should be doing more on social media, but I’m not sure how go goes bootcamp, it has our highest possible recommendation. We don’t recommend any courses, really, except that one and a window, one or two others. So this is really we couldn’t be more, more, you know, assertive and telling you really, this is the time to invest in yourself. So

Gogo Bethke 38:16
it’s 10 years of knowledge, you know, plugs right into that course. And the way I look at it, just let’s do a simple math. What do you think nationwide? Average commission is

D.J. Paris 38:25
on a transaction? Yeah. Five 5000? Maybe?

Gogo Bethke 38:30
So that’s, that’s a it’s $5,000 on one transaction alone. Yeah. So if I can generate you one transaction, just one, we’re not talking to 60 million I did, you’re talking that one transaction that would pay for the course five times. The course would pay for itself five times over, if it’s shitty enough to only Garin only gets you one transaction. Right? Yeah, yeah. No brainer.

D.J. Paris 38:59
It’s a total no brainer. And, and now’s the time to double down on those efforts. And, and you know, it look, none of us. None of us are feeling comfortable right now. Nobody’s comfortable. But that’s okay. Because out of discomfort, it creates energy. And this is where you can take that energy and harnessed and learn new things. So So realize that we’re all little on edge and irritated and claustrophobic but yet, okay, that’s true. Yes, we’re all feeling that way. But we also can take that energy and push it in a positive direction and, and use it to learn stuff. And then once once again, once everything’s back to normal, it’s going to happen, we will be back to normal at some point, and then you will have gone Oh, I wish I this is not vacation time, right. And I think it’s easy for all of us to feel like this is vacation. It is not this is time to invest in yourself. And so, Go Go’s boot camp is a great idea. And it’s just full of really great information too. So We encourage all the listeners to check it out. Also, please everybody follow go go on Instagram, which is Go Go’s real estate Gee oh gee Oh s real estate. We’ll also be posting that link. But go go once again, always a pleasure. Thank you on behalf of the listeners for continuing to show up month after month. We appreciate it the listeners appreciate it. On behalf of gogo and myself to the listeners we say thank you for continuing to support gogo, our show, tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing from this, this conversation we just had, and from all the conversations we have with the great guests that are kind enough to do our show, and send them a link to our podcast. And also please follow us on Facebook as well. We’re facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod. If you’re on there right now, you might be watching us recording this live. If not go there and you’ll be able to see us record every one of our episodes live and we also post an article every single day that we find online designed to help you grow your business gogo thank you again. We hope you guys get out of we hope you become essential quickly in Michigan so you can go do more stuff.

Gogo Bethke 41:14
I can hardly wait to be back in Rio I you know the little things like I want to grab Starbucks on the way to somewhere and I wouldn’t wear high heels. I want I want my air my hair to blow in the wind in the car like just little things. The little things in life is what I miss. But thank you so much for having me today. Thank you so much for everyone who listened and give us a time of the day. And happy selling.

D.J. Paris 41:35
Happy selling. Thanks. We’ll see. We’ll see you guys on the next episode.

Welcome to our BRAND-NEW monthly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!

Gogo Bethke from Gogo’s Bootcamp is known as the Social Media Queen of Real Estate because she built up her entire practice and team (now over 150 agents) through social media engagement. In this episode Gogo discusses what real estate agents can do today during stay-at-home to keep their business running. Also, she demonstrates first-hand how vulnerability is the key to engagement!

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

DISCLAIMER: Gogo’s 30-day moneyback guarantee is no longer available.

Gogo Bethke can be reached at gogosrealestate@gmail.com and at her Instagram account.

Purchase Gogo’s Bootcamp by clicking here – Keeping It Real Podcast listeners get a discount!

Gogo's Bootcamp 2.0

Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the best social media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level. She’s so confident there’s a 30 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose. Keeping it real listeners receive a special discount, so please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee Oh gee, oh podcast.com for your special discount, and now on with the show.

Welcome, everyone to another episode of Keeping it real this. We believe we are the largest podcast for real estate professionals made by real estate professionals. My name is DJ Parris. I am your guide and host to the show and today is our monthly episode with the amazing and wonderful gogo Beth key from gogos bootcamp. This is our social media bootcamp that we do every single month. Let me tell you a little bit about Gogo. If you are new to the show, gogo Beth key came to United States in 2003. To build her American dream. She was broke had no sphere of influence, no experience barely spoke English, and with only $6 to her name. So that left her with nothing else but Facebook to help build her business. And that’s where she started she created gogos real estate and a real estate career began with the power of social media gogo has sold over 45 million in residential real estate transactions. She shares the good, the bad, and the ugly side of real estate with her honest snippets into her everyday life with her 10s of 1000s of social media followers. And in the real estate community. She has earned the nickname the social media queen. She has been asked to present at all sorts of realtor events all over the country. She’s built a social media bootcamp as well for realtors called Go Go’s bootcamp. Today, she has a team and this is probably an old number of 130 agents, it’s probably much bigger now. And she is consistently growing that nationwide. Her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate and if she can do it, a girl from Transylvania Romania with no US education and no sphere of influence, no education or no money or experience, then you can do it as well. We’d like you to follow go go on Instagram at gogos real estate. And also we have we highly recommend this is our highest possible recommendation that everyone listening signs up for Go Go’s boot camp for our listeners, we have a special website set up with a discount, so please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee, oh, gee, oh, podcast.com Check out her boot camp. It’s amazing. I’ve done it. It’s incredible. You should do it as well. And now welcome once again, gogo, thanks for being here.

Gogo Bethke 3:00
Well, I thank you so much for that intro.

D.J. Paris 3:03
We’re so excited to have you, and love talking about you and your success. And you know, your business is just exploding. It’s always growing. And you’re helping so many agents with their social media. In particular, right now, when there isn’t much that anybody can do. You are in Michigan, and you guys were not deemed an essential service. as of the recording of this. Hopefully, that’ll change soon. So you’re the agents can’t do a whole lot. So what’s going on right now? What what are you what are you seeing out there?

Gogo Bethke 3:35
I mean, this is a time for social media. If you if you haven’t had the time to figure it out, like you are forced now to figure it out. Because it’s almost the only thing and the last thing standing that our stereotypes can do from the comfort of our homes. Like if you look at New York, they’re not even allowed to cold call anymore. So it’s like we can do, we can Dornoch, we can hold open houses, we can network with other agents in the industry unless it’s virtual, you know, we can do the things of the lesser things. And we can do it so long. On social media, we can, if you think about it, this is the time where people spend four hours a day in average on different social media platforms, because there’s nothing else to do but cruising at, you know, just see what’s going on. So I think this is a perfect timing, to make sure that you’re prepared for what’s coming. Because I do believe that the good times are coming. As soon as we are released back to society, we are going to have a phenomenal year. You know, our prices are still standing strong. Our interest rates are low. Our inventory is so low right now here in our neck of the woods. And I feel like as soon as we were released, and everybody can get pre approved and the rates stay where they’re at or maybe even get better than the average of the 3%. I mean, I think we are going to have an amazing year in real estate. And I just think everybody should use this time to grow their business. You know, get the stuff done that they usually don’t have the time to do build those parts of the business that will help them scale when we are finally released. And I have a couple of tips for that.

D.J. Paris 4:59
But you Yeah, let’s let’s have I have a quick thing I wanted to mention is I wonder how many people who are stuck at home which is the majority of America at this point, and are sort of feeling constricted by by their, the, the physical size of their their home. And I’m wondering how many of those people when the when all of a sudden we’re back to normal are like, it’s time to upgrade? I know I’m thinking about that. And I bet you a lot of people are too and I was thinking, maybe that’s great content for social medias to start to talk about, Hey, are you starting to feel like maybe not necessarily to say oh, by the way, if you want to buy a bigger home use me. Maybe that’s not the time to do that. But just to talk about how everything’s feeling a little tighter and more constricted now.

Gogo Bethke 5:43
Yeah, that too. And then we were talking with with Dwayne last night. Just think of all of the people. And this might not sound good, but surely isn’t a conversation at the dinner table last night? Think of all of the people who can send one another? Yes. Or they’re realizing how much they don’t like to send one another. Because when you don’t spend so much time with somebody, you’re not that annoying. But now that you have to be with them night after day after night after day, week after week after month. Like I think this might also mess with our divorce rates and that again, for sure have real estate altogether. I mean, I don’t wish this on anyone. But when you lacked half with people, it can get ugly if you don’t like

D.J. Paris 6:23
yeah, there’s going to be probably a lot of babies born about nine months from now. A lot of people getting divorces.

Gogo Bethke 6:30
Exactly. So I feel like in real estate, yes. Especially here in Michigan we are, we are shut down like we are not considered a central so there isn’t much we can do. But at the same time, I feel like when finally we get released, there are so many different angles that go into just birth, the real estate market as you said, people are gonna start having babies 1010 months from now they’re going to need to upsize. Also many people realize, you know what, I don’t have a home office, I have four children and a dog and a parent running around crazy and I need to go live like you won’t be able to do that as long as you have that assigned pace. So I feel like a lot of people are going to just, you know, change residences because of that. And then the borders and then you know this and that and new jobs and relocations because so many people has lost their jobs. So who knows what the new jobs are going to take on. I wonder

D.J. Paris 7:17
how many companies who were people go into the office I wonder how many of them are starting to realize we can do a lot of this virtually and after this all goes back to normal. Be very interesting to see how many people end up staying work from home. And so your point is, is really well said that you really do need a dedicated space.

Gogo Bethke 7:39
Yeah, yeah. And for us, I mean I’ve been with exp you know that since October 2018. So I’m like 14 months and 15 months something like that of working from home. So I’m totally used to it. And now the person I’m not used to is my husband also got a real estate license his full, full full time realtor right now. He used to work corporate America and travel all the time. So now he’s home full time. Now our children are home full time. Our dog is home full time you know so it’s like having the house full and even though just before you came on live here. Even though I told my children and they’re old enough they’re almost 11 and 13 there was enough to understand hey man is and alive. My 13 year old decided to walk like army walk up to bam bam I opened the door just before you get on your neck seriously nice. Like just because I’m in a different level of the house sounds travel. Like you can walk around like that and I’m trying to go live here so it’s like adjusting to the working from home thing. It’s an adjustment for everybody.

D.J. Paris 8:39
Even we’re all seeing we’re all seeing a lot more of people that that we’re not always normally seeing and we’re seeing a lot less of people too right it’s it’s this weird combination of you know the the you better you better really liked the people you live with because

Gogo Bethke 8:55
zactly exactly when you’re stuck with them and I can’t even imagine like in areas where they live really close to one another like New York where people live in a cute little tiny quarters like in Romania. My parents live in Romania. They’re not allowed out on the road. Yeah, like we can at least go on a bike ride we go on a hike if it’s nice and sunny out we throw football in the backyard and stuff but in Romania you’re not leaving your house unless you’re going to you have an emergency or you need to go grocery shopping but if that’s the case only one person can go right so imagine areas like that when you’re like literally stuck in another shoe box. I would probably start losing it.

D.J. Paris 9:31
Yeah, I we have some of our help. Here at our office live in the Philippines and they are not really allowed to go outside except for grocery shopping. They’re not really allowed to take walks zonna Yeah zonna who’s our our producer from she lives in Kosovo same thing. They’re not really allowed to do much so we’re very lucky that we can still get out and do a few things.

Gogo Bethke 9:56
Stay the sister lives in a high rise in the in the city. I grew up fan in the same high res I grew up in, they, they live in an apartment. And so they ended up going out to my parents house, because they live in a village and they have a yard so the children can actually go outside, but you still can go out on the road, you can be in your own yard. But if my sister stayed in the apartment, they would literally be inside an apartment all day every day.

D.J. Paris 10:17
Yeah, yeah, we’re, we’re very lucky. There’s, you know, here, it’s even though we’re now the epicenter of everything for the virus, but we’re still able to do some things. And we’re lucky, I think so.

Gogo Bethke 10:30
is in third or fourth place, too. So yes, that’d be one grocery shopping, and I had masks and gloves and all that. To germ freak, I am not a junk freak myself, I believe that this flow is pretty, it’s not the one that’s going to take me. But you know, he made me wear a glove and mask and all that. And then when I got home, I shot a quick video and I touched my hair like this with my glove. And he was like, You’re gonna have to take a shower. You have to wash your hair, you have to burn your clothes.

D.J. Paris 11:00
Well, I mean, it’s, it’s at the end, the real problem is, is we don’t start showing symptoms until, you know, for like, a week or so. So it’s, you know, nobody, you know, we we probably all have it right now. And we don’t even know.

Unknown Speaker 11:14
I hope not. But yeah, I

D.J. Paris 11:16
hope not. I mean, you and I will be fine. And and, you know, our people like without, you know, horrible preexisting conditions. And, you know, but yeah, a lot of, you know, I was thinking about like, going to visit my parents for Easter. They they’re impure. They’re in their early 70s. And I was like, and we both talked about it, and they want me to come, but they’re like, you probably shouldn’t, and I was like, You’re right, I probably shouldn’t. Because I’m not worried about me. But yeah, I’m

Gogo Bethke 11:39
not worried about me, our oldest is type one diabetic. And if you looked at the people that the mortality rate, the highest ones are diabetics. Now, I can’t specify if it’s type one diabetics, or diabetics as an overweight diabetics. I don’t know. And I certainly don’t want to find out. So that’s the other thing like we have to keep our immune challenged child

D.J. Paris 11:59
secure. Yeah. And my girlfriend has has some an autoimmune disease as well, or just sorta rather. And so yeah, so we have to keep her safe as well. So I can appreciate that. So what what are you telling your agents and all of the Go Go’s? Bootcamp, people to do right now on social media? What are the tactful ways to do it? And what are maybe what are ways not to do it? Right?

Gogo Bethke 12:20
Yeah. So I don’t think this is a time to start lead generating, I don’t think this is the time to be calling people and asking for their business. We don’t do any of that. This is the time to help one another. So there’s any way that you can have one of the things that we have done and this one is a little bit more detailed, but I tried to explain as as as good as I can, I guess if you guys look at back in 2015 1617 18, sorry, back in 2000. What was it 6789, the crash time and all that people use a lot of their equity, they will take equity out of the homes and they will go buy boats and whatever jet skis and whatever they you know, bikes and whatever they wanted to spend their money on. And so a lot of people over 820, some billion I think we use, we took out of equity and in the homes. Right now, in the last few years, 1617 1819, we have only used 200 and some odd billion. So a lot of the people right now have equity in their home. So if you have clients that may or may have lost their job, or they need some sort of a, or they’re just uncertain, and they need some sort of a help, and there’s always an equity they could tap into in their home, most of the people right now have equity in their home. So that’s also just a nice way of like touching base with them. Just reach out to them, Hey, you may not think of this, but you potentially could have equity in your home, that could be something that you could tap into, and help yourself financially in this time. So if I can help you let me know, I will be more than happy to send you a quick CMA a competitive market analysis through our MLS access, I don’t know how everybody’s MLS works, but we have an hour’s real count one, that’s called RPR. Because just plug in an address in there will give us approximate market value. So that’s one way of doing it. So then you can just say all I need from you, which is DME, or email me your physical address, I will send back a report that shows your potential market value, and then your equity is market value minus what you owe on it. And then also, we have a list of lenders that we have been working with through the years, please feel free to give them a call either one of them, see if you would qualify for a home equity line of credit, and if something that could help you in these times, and then also just feel like when you help them in need. They’re just automatic, and they will reach out to you when they’re ready to buy and sell. So I’m not asking for the business right now you’re pretty much just helping them and in this time of with our resources, resources and our connections. And then when the time has come around and they need to sell and buy I’m sure they will call us.

D.J. Paris 14:43
Yeah, that’s a great idea. So you know, that’s a real creative way to, for people to start to think about, you know, getting more immediate cash and another option. Obviously, with rates being so low, it’s a really good time to look into refinancing as well, which isn’t going to directly Put money in your pocket, but it’s gonna reduce some of that monthly spend. So right now the banks and lend lenders are really overwhelmed because there’s so much activity with refinances and and people just, you know, buying homes, despite obviously all the

Gogo Bethke 15:15
challenges were so low beta. So like if you have something you know if you’re into fives or sixes, maybe you bought years and years ago. And right now you can get it down to 3%, that you’re saving 10s of 1000s of dollars 10s of 1000s of that work, depending how much your mortgage was, of course, but a lot of money. So that’s just one way of being able to reaching back and giving back and at these times, not asking for anything in return, I strongly recommend not to push your services right now. And to people because they really had just, it’s a time of uncertainty, of course they can. If they have realistic needs, and they love, love and appreciate you and follow you already, they’re going to reach out to you no matter what. But I just don’t feel like these are the times to take advantage of people. And you know,

D.J. Paris 15:57
I have I agree and I have an idea for you. I wanted to share this with you. And you tell me if it’s a good idea or a bad idea, because I’m not sure but I think it might be a good idea. So gogo is, you know, as far as social media, she is the end all be all for good ideas with social media. So I was thinking, since real estate is hyperlocal. And we have so many small businesses out there right now that are struggling. You know, restaurants, in particular, retail shops, of course, are really, really struggling. So I was thinking, you know, since we have our listeners who work in their local communities, maybe one idea could be that you could reach out to some of these businesses restaurant, for example, that might be struggling. I know like in Chicago, our restaurants are really struggling right now. And they’re trying to let people know that no, we still have takeout, where we have specials where you can come. And I was thinking, wouldn’t it be kind of cool. If you live in an area, that area that you want to specialize in, reach out to some of these local businesses and say, Hey, I would love to do you know, a quick little interview with you, it could be five minutes, it doesn’t have to be long. I can bring you on my IG TV, you know, stream, or we can just do a one minute video and post it to Instagram, and Facebook Live and do also and we could just talk about your business. And I could just make sure that every one of my followers and listeners knows what you guys are, you’re still open if they are, I don’t know. What do you think about that?

Gogo Bethke 17:20
It’s an amazing idea yesterday or the day before, when we went grocery shopping and I was talking about being messed up from head to tail. There was a restaurant or whatever. There’s a business here locally that supplies to restaurants usually they supply fresh produce, but only to restaurants usually. Now while the restaurants are really not working, they’re doing some carry out. They’re only open from four to eight some of them and only direct carry out while the producers just sitting on this facility. So they ended up opening it up for the general public doing and I ended up going there. We heard from my father not we went there while we were there. I asked him Hey, you guys have a Facebook page. Do you mind if I promote this to mine and develop? Oh my gosh, yeah, we would appreciate it so much more about blog. If you think about it, they’re sitting on fresh produce go bad like this. It’s not it has a shelf life of a week. Yeah, you have to get rid of it. If not, it’s gonna go bad. So I literally did a quick little video as you walked out of there all messed up and all that and, and I just did like, Hey, guys, here’s where we are. This is what’s going on this place is usually not over open for the public, we showed what we got, like, for 50 bucks, we’ve walked out of like two boxes, that’s like two big full boxes of fresh produce. And they were so thankful. And then even just yesterday, and today, I ended up seeing a couple of our Facebook friends who went there, they ended up taking pictures of the product and stuff like that, and they ended up posting it. So it’s just like, it’s like a snowball effect. But then that place ended up tagging me back. And they thanked me for our services and for helping them getting the word out there. And I’m hoping that one day we’re going to need a realtor, they’re going to remember this time and they’re going to be like we’re going to call the global check. And that’s why we’re doing it is like helping one another. You know, I also believe in karma. And I believe you know, you get what you get in life. And if you can give for somebody not expecting anything in return, they will also give to you not expecting anything in return when the time comes around. So definitely reach out to local restaurants, if not in us, you could just reach out to local restaurants and be like, Hey guys, what are you guys, what is your schedule? What is your menu because they have a carrier or different menu now for carry out. It could be as simple as hey, could you shoot over your carry out menu and then I will post it on my Facebook and say hey guys, the wooden spoon is open Monday to Friday from four to eight they do carry out and here’s the carry out menu please support a local business and just provide that and then thank them and they’re going to say that they are going to share just going both ways. So now their followers going to see your post your follower is going to be there like going to see their business and they want they are tagged they can go over and follow their business plan. So there’s so many ways you can do this. You can also interview through zoom just as you sad because we can’t physically be in the same place. But you can certainly interview local businesses or the realtors whatever that helps you and then post that and just you know how To get the word out the word out whatever you want to the world to know about.

D.J. Paris 20:05
Yeah, it’s such a great idea. Now, you know, you have everybody is scared, everyone’s struggling a lot of businesses, they would love it if you reach especially like, I know a lot of a high end restaurants are really nervous, because obviously, they’re not serving and you don’t think of them as takeout places. And a lot of the ones here in Chicago have converted into doing daily specials and meals, and they only can reach their email list, which might be very small.

Gogo Bethke 20:31
Yet, so yep, they were doing business. Yeah, yeah. So

D.J. Paris 20:35
So now, you can now you can reach out to them and say, Hey, are you guys doing any anything of takeout carry allies? You know, Would you do a three minute interview with me? You know, I’ll send you the Zoom link, and you can do it on your phone? And or just send me the menu, and I’ll promote it. But yeah, those are great ideas.

Gogo Bethke 20:52
Yeah, so many ways you can do it, we also have our vendor list. So this is a good time to start building that if you don’t have one, you know how many times they ask you for a plumber. And for a painter and for a desk for a data dog walker, a mower, you know, a landscaping company like all of these things, this is a time to reach out to your friends on Facebook. Net own, you know, small businesses and support them say, Hey, would you please sign this letter, so just read an Excel sheet send them the link, they will literally plug themselves in there are vendors even give discounts to our clients. So they will give like 10% out just because they are our clients and we refer them they will do this, they will do that for free. You know, hold me value, whatever that you know that does. So this is your time to start supporting those local businesses start building your preferred vendor list. So then when the good times come around, you have your your list, because no other time when we are so busy, you don’t have the time to build and you don’t have the time to reach out to your friend who’s like, what do you do you have a cement company? That’s right. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What area you guys cover? What type of words do you guys do? Like what do you need more clients? And would you be interested if he added you to our preferred vendor list? Like that kind of stuff? And then I guarantee you, I swear every time we reach out to one of our friends here locally that has a local business, you’re like, oh, yeah, by the way, do you do commercial? Do you do inventory or thinking of building do you do blah, blah, blah, it just automatically turns into the next realistic conversation?

D.J. Paris 22:11
Yeah, and now’s a good time to, to where not just to have that vendor list. But like it’s gonna go missing. You could also interview each one of these people, you could set up a little zoom meeting, a three minute Zoom meeting, it doesn’t have to be long. And just record these these interviews. And then you can use that information as social media content. You can also just have it available in case somebody says, Hey, do you have a good attorney, we can use Yeah, you know what, I’m going to send you his information. Also, I did a little three minute things, you can see what he or she looks like how they sound, what their energy is like. And you could send that over as well. And that’ll even be so it’s now’s a great time to start aggregating all of that information.

Gogo Bethke 22:48
And also, I mean, we’ve worked with so many different vendors just on our end, you know, you might be like, you know, what, yes, I’ve worked with this title company forever, but they have messed up the last, you know, nine fires out of 10. Maybe it’s time to switch title companies, you know, I mean, so maybe this is your time to interview those other files and narrow down, who has what you need, who has the work ethic and the work style that you have. So you, you don’t butt heads in a transaction, and then just, you know, work on that, like, there’s so many different aspects of the real estate industry that you could be working on? Most importantly, yourself? Yeah. So that’s what I want to talk about, take that nap, that you usually don’t have time to do that book that you always wanted to, but never had the time take that course, that you like, Oh, if I only had the time I go through that real estate, social media training, you know, I mean, so whatever is that you wanted to do, but never had the time God just cleared off your schedule. Go get it done.

D.J. Paris 23:40
I just I got an email this morning. And I have to really give credit to Compass, the company compass. This came from a compass broker. I don’t know if compass wrote it or if she wrote it, but it was it was a her monthly newsletter, and obviously, not, you know, talking about real estate stuff right now might not be all that well received. So I almost deleted it, because I was like, I don’t ever read that stuff anyway, but I was about to delete it. And it caught my eye because the entire article was 10 things stay at home moms can or parents can do right now to keep their kids busy during this time. And it was it was like Oh, that’s really really smart. And it goes into what we were just talking about. It was useful information. It was timely. And it was not talking about real estate. It was you know, actually something people could use. I was like that was a great email and I normally I see those newsletters and I just go at who cares? And I went I know I’m not going to read that because I don’t have children but I forwarded to some of our brokers and I was like this is a good idea. Yeah,

Gogo Bethke 24:41
yeah. I mean think about it all of the parents at home like I also I just heard from one of the agents in our team that in Arizona they already done for Dave will have no more school this year. Yeah. So we it’s not official here in Michigan. Yeah, but it’s probably coming which means even if we get released back in a month or two my children’s gonna be home all day every day. You are going to have to figure out some sort of an entertainment for them. Yeah, I mean, like, especially not being able to work outside of the house, when we finally can, I want to leave, like I want to go do all the things that I wasn’t able to do physically be in another place, which means we’d have to leave my children at home, which means I have to figure out a way for them to be entertained or dragging with me or drop off at a museum or hire a sitter or you know, any like, it’s going to take some adjustment of how, how we live life and giving ideas for parents who were not used to having to entertain the children at home, like myself. That’s a great one. You like, oh, yeah, we can do that. But no, think of that. Love it, love it. Good idea. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is reviews and feedback, right? So it’s so important to have those five, five star reviews and all the different platforms because people are going to Google you. They want to make sure they if they are ready to put their biggest asset on the market and the most money they will ever exchange hands wet. They want to make sure that it’s handled properly. So they’re going to Google if you don’t have a social presence, especially with a mullet millennial, if you don’t have a Google if you don’t show up on it, you don’t exist. So it’s very important to have your reviews and feedbacks and I’m going to talk about the few sites that I that I think it’s important to have a presence on. So even though I don’t buy leads, it is very important to have a profile on Zillow because most people are going to look you up. They want to see you. Everyone’s going to Zillow, everyone goes to Zillow, they’re going to check you out. They’re going to see your production, your price range your reviews, and feedbacks, what area you cover all that. So even though I never bought Zillow leads, I still have a Zillow profile. So they can look me up on there. They see my transactions in other areas. And I do it and how many have done and my review. So I think Zillow is very important. Next one is realtor.com. They are kind of neck to neck, less traffic. But people some people just love to go to that commerce, Zillow, and then Facebook page. So if you don’t have one yet, it is the time to create one you want to business Facebook page. So then you can have reviews and feedbacks. The next one is Google My Business. So all of these you should have, and and all of these, you should have reviews and feedback. So let’s talk about Google My Business. That is probably the most important now. That is Millennials toward having babies and you know, meeting their home away from mom and dad’s basement and things like that. They’re going to Google

D.J. Paris 27:21
you. And the reason why Google My Business is the most important just to make sure everyone understands why we’re saying that is Google prioritizes, the Google My Business page listing when you’re searching for reviews, so it’s going to show up above Yelp above Facebook above Zillow, it’s going to show up at the very, very top because it’s Google’s own platform. And you know, almost all the searches done online are done through Google. So you need to create a Google My Business account. And you need to be asking for reviews there.

Gogo Bethke 27:53
Yes. So what the funny part is, I was very surprised to find out when I created this that Google will actually send your snail mail to confirm your account. I was like, Yes, that’s right. Yeah, they do. I’m like, you know, this is a joke, as of April 1, it is April 1 and

D.J. Paris 28:08
April 1, but it is not a joke. And it’s not a joke. So you’re gonna get a you get like a postcard in the mail or something. Yeah, so

Gogo Bethke 28:14
you go to Google My Business. So literally just go to Google, put in Google My Business, you’re going to find a page and there is going to be a create or join or some button on there and just follow the steps. It is really not brain surgery. Now if you’re an exp agent, because now there’s many of us out there, we don’t have physical locations. So I want you to be very careful what address you put in there. Because it’s going to be I mean, you do have to hide it from the public, but I don’t ever want you to not be able to figure it out. And now suddenly, your home address is on Google, because you don’t want people showing up at your front door. Right? Well, if that’s the case, I recommend maybe talking with a local title company or local lender or somebody else that you’re friends with that has a local office downtown somewhere that you can ask them, Hey, can I just put your address down as my physical location. So if somebody wants to me on something, or send me a book, or send me a postcard or something, then I can, you can just let me know. And I can pick it up from your office. So I talked, I talked to my local lender and my my Google, my business is actually registered at her local office, right? There just an idea, you also have the option of hiding the physical address. So let’s say if you have only an online address, you know, an online business that you really don’t need people physically, then you can also just do that and hide the physical location. But either way, you have to disclose the physical location because they’re going to send you a postcard, right? That postcard it has a five digit code, five, six, something like that digit code in there, you’re going to have to go back to Google My Business, you’re going to have to enter that that code that you received in the mail can take up to two weeks to get that postcard. And after that your Google My Business is confirmed. Now you have a Google My Business account under you’re going to have the ability to post it’s kind of like Instagram in a way where when you post your posts will I think they only stay up there for seven days and seven days. Yeah. And then they go poof, so just make sure you know periodically Get under a new post something. And then definitely use the reviews and feedback on there. So, ours automatically when Christine my office manager processes our files. After closing, we have an automated email drip campaign for past clients. So we just switch them over in our CRM program to past clients and one of the very first text message and email goes out is asking for reviews. And then you pretty much say hey, I loved working with you, I hope you had the same five star experience and I have with you again, five star experience you can just kind of putting it out there. I had a five star experience working with you, I hope you had the same kind of reminding you of like, what am I expecting you to say when you’re filling it out? Now of course, they’re gonna be honest, they’re gonna tell you how they really felt about the transaction. But I’m kind of hinting at what how I felt working with them. And now and you send them that email with the four links. So you’re gonna do your, your realtor.com your Zillow or five lanes, realtor.com, Zillow, your own personal Facebook page, your Google My Business. And Did I forget anything? I think.com Yeah, realtors, Zillow, Facebook, and Google My Business. So those four, and they all in there. Now they all require the feedback to come directly from the source. So they can just fill out one and you cannot copy and paste it into the other. Neither one of these sites will allow you to do that it has to come straight from the source. So usually what we say in that email is like, Hey, I’m only asking for five minutes of your time. You know, just so you know, our business is more to mouth. And reviews. And feedbacks are so important. When people Google us I would truly appreciate if you could take, you know, five minutes of your time, just go to the first one, fill it out, copy it, go to the next one, paste it next one, paste it next and paste it. So they don’t have to type it up four times, they can just copy and paste only have to type it up one time. So it speeds up their process. But they do have to click individually each of those links and go through the steps. So yeah, so if nothing else is built an automated email. So after closings, all of your profiles are set up properly. You include that link to your direct reviews page on Zillow, your direct reviews page on realtor.com, Facebook and Google My Business and then they can start filling it out after every closing. Now you might be ahead of the curve. And you might already have all that now it’s a good time to get video from your past clients. So yes, your home during that, then do you have a minute to shoot over a quick review video of how you loved working with us. I mean, I already know you left it with words and our sights and we appreciate it. But people some people are visual and they would really, it would really register better if they saw you actually seeing those things. And if you don’t mind just to the shaft selfie style video and send it back to us now those videos you can build into your websites you can put in you know, as a post on your social media pages right now it’s a good time to kind of just at what is it called it’s a shameless self promotion is what I what I like calling get to kind of let the world know like everybody who decided to work with you in the past, they enjoyed that experience. And here’s proof of that. And you can take those little snippets of videos and post it on your social media platforms.

D.J. Paris 33:04
Yeah, and you can also post those videos right on Google My Business. And I think that is, you know, a huge, huge thing. We’ve been doing that for testimonials for brokers who joined our company, for doing that. For the last four months, we’ve been posting those videos and watching the number of views we get on those videos from Google, my business is incredible. I you know, I don’t know how many of those people convert into clients or whatever. But boy, those videos get watched. So you obviously put them on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, maybe even but definitely upload them directly into your Google My Business account they get they get looked at for sure.

Gogo Bethke 33:43
Yes, yeah. And it helps you I mean, it helps the other agents when they’re trying to make the decision, should I should I not join your team, right? There is PII from everybody else that decided to make that same decision, or they are happy that they did. So yeah. yourself anymore. They sold you for them.

D.J. Paris 33:59
And everyone should be paying it forward as to as well. If you’re expecting people to write reviews for you be somebody who writes reviews for the places you visit. And I just had I got sick a few weeks ago, not not related to the current condition, just good old fashioned food poisoning. But I had to cancel this trip, I was going out to San Francisco. And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go. So the place I was going to be staying, which was very expensive. They didn’t really have a cancellation policy. And I and I let them know, I’m so sorry. I’m really sick. I don’t know if there’s anything to do with the bill. They were nice enough to give me a full refund, which was insane. They did not have to do that. And I immediately wrote them back and I said oh my gosh, I was not expecting that you guys are amazing. What can I do to support you right now? And this is right now when everything was the country was kind of shutting down. And they said if you could write us a review, and they gave me three locations Google Facebook and TripAdvisor because they’re a destination thing. And I said Consider it done. I copied and pasted into all three, I wrote them back, I said, I just did all three. And they were like, Oh my gosh, that means so much to us, you have no idea. So do that for other people as well. I mean, if you’re going to expect people to write for you do it for them and pay it forward, for sure.

Gogo Bethke 35:14
Awesome. And same, I mean, if you think about it with agents that you have worked with, like, even just go to your closing this year, those of agents that you’ve worked with on the other side of the transaction, and go and leave a review and just say, Hey, I love working with Angela, she’s an awesome agent, I was on the list in touch with the buyer side being, you know, we had smooth sailing to the closing table. And I only wish that every other agent would represent their client. And so you know, timely manner, or however you want to word it, and just send it and then now Angela receives this was like, Oh, my gosh, look what you sent me. Let me do the same. Now she’s gonna go back and leave a review on your page of how awesome he was to work with you. Even though it’s peer to peer. It’s still a review.

D.J. Paris 35:51
Yeah, it’s awesome. That is such a great idea. So not only going back to all your clients and saying, Hey, I would really appreciate if you could help me write a review. Go to all the co op brokers, the brokers on the other side of the deal the agents on the other side and say, hey, I want to and you just even if you can’t find them, call them and say, You know what, I never wrote you a review. I want to do that for you right now. How do I do that? Where do you want me to do that? You want me to do it on Zillow. Ask them they will be they will they have never got that phone call ever. So you are going to blow their mind? And then they’re probably going to say, oh, and I’ll do the same for you.

Gogo Bethke 36:23
Yeah. And then also, I mean, you know, so many are like, Oh, I don’t feel comfortable with video. Well, this is a time to start feeling comfortable. Yeah, I’m not been asked to do so you have all the time on TV and the look of your home that it’s peace and quiet, and start shooting some videos. You know, just start and it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s just talk about whatever’s close to your heart. Talk about something that you’re so good at, in this industry that you want to help other agents to be so good at what they need to do and just shoot it and post it. Next thing you know, by the time we get out of here you to feel so comfortable with video, then you’ll be ready to just you’ll be taking videos all day every day.

D.J. Paris 37:00
And don’t worry if you don’t look perfect. People don’t respond well to perfection. They want to see what yeah. Yeah, there we go. I love it. I love it.

Gogo Bethke 37:13
So don’t take you know, don’t care about if you don’t look perfect. So here it is my imperfection.

D.J. Paris 37:18
Yeah, yeah, I have tons of imperfection myself. So I can appreciate that. But it gogo is so absolutely right. And look at the courage. She just she had the courage to do something that a lot of people wouldn’t do. Right? She just and I didn’t know she was going to do that. So that’s so awesome that you did that. But she had the courage to be vulnerable and what vulnerability, it’s the most attractive quality in another human being the courage to show who we really are. And you have this unique opportunity to do that right now. You know, you can show it physically, like, here’s what I look like without makeup, or here’s what I look like, you know, without a tooth. But you know, the point is, is that’s what people connect with, they connect with with vulnerability. So don’t worry if you don’t look camera perfect. Right? Go go and I are not camera perfect either. And, but we’re what we’re authentic, right? We’re our honest,

Gogo Bethke 38:12
when I say share the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, you know it not every time you’re going to make a commission, not every client is a walk in the park some of our walk in Jurassic Park. And that’s okay. Like you can’t, doesn’t one of my favorite jokes, because it’s the truth. You know what I mean? It so that’s why I think the secret to you know, the amount of followers that I get is because I show the good vetting the good because some videos I have my tooth in, and in some videos on searching for my tooth, because I can find it. You know what I mean? But it is the truth, though. I mean, I could try to hide it and show like how my life is perfect, but it’s not. You know, I lost my tooth in a sandwich. And now I had to get oral surgery and I won’t have a front tooth for six months. Oh, no. Because I had to do I had no bone there. So then I had to go in and they had to do a bone graft. And now I have someone’s head bone in my face like now that has my gosh,

D.J. Paris 39:02
that’s amazing. But also, but also like, it also just makes us all so much more human. And we’re all imperfect and to try to project. You know, it’s this thing that a lot of realtors, they get like a really nice headshot and then they don’t change it for 15 years, and then people go, Well, that’s an old hedge. Like you can get your headshot it’s okay to look like you it’s okay to look like a real person. It’s okay.

Gogo Bethke 39:28
It’s okay to share that you did have a front tooth for six months.

D.J. Paris 39:34
Maybe we should start we’ll start a fund to maybe to get you maybe there’s like a new like radical therapy or technology to get you a new tooth faster. We’ll have to look is a long time it was

Gogo Bethke 39:48
a long time. I mean I kind of chose this route. I could have veneers I guess Yeah, or a bridge but if I did that I wouldn’t have to mess with the healthy tooth around that I don’t want to have you know when I lost one I don’t want to have to file down three next to it. So I can have four of the same. No, and that’s the that’s the only other option. But that’s my only healthy option where I can put just the one two back in, is by waiting out for the for the bone to heal. And then they’re going to do an implant and they’re going to put a tooth on it. But that’s why it’s taking me so long to have a front tooth is because I have to wait when I had the bone graft that literally cut me open and put bone in my face. That has to heal together with my own bone to strengthen to be able to hold the implant. So that’s going to take time, and I’m okay with that you’re not, I always believe God doesn’t give you what you can handle. And finally, if you know if that imperfection if anything, people, it catches people off guard, they’re still paying attention, you know, we might have enough right here. But when I pop my tool, I guarantee you they were all like, Wow.

D.J. Paris 40:52
I love it. And again, it’s it’s courageous. And this is a business where if you can demonstrate the courage to be yourself. And if you don’t have an answer to a question, tell your client you know, I’m gonna double check. I don’t I want to double check on the answer on that. I’ll get right back.

Gogo Bethke 41:08
I don’t know the answer.

D.J. Paris 41:09
I don’t know. Yeah.

Gogo Bethke 41:12
I don’t know. But I know who does.

D.J. Paris 41:14
I know who doesn’t I will find out and I’ll get right back to you. Yeah, what an awesome place to finish up let’s let’s let’s wrap up because this this was great. And I so always great talking to go go. So I want to make another plug for two things for go go I want everybody to go on Instagram and follow her. So you find her at gogos real estate geo gos real estate. So find her just search for if you can type that in, you’ll find her no problem. We’ll also post a link right on on our, on our when we published this episode. And also I want you all to subscribe and be a member of her boot camp, this is the time to do it. And this will pay you dividends, huge, huge dividends. So definitely

Gogo Bethke 41:57
do one turns out if you get nothing out of it. But one transaction in your lifetime, which I’ve done over 60 Millions, I can guarantee you get one transaction, I can’t guarantee you unless you do the work. But if you do the work, I guarantee you’ll get not one many transactions over but one transaction, one commission would pay for the bootcamp, at least what five times over their minimum,

D.J. Paris 42:19
oh, easily. Because what she’s really going to teach you how to do is how to build a social media lifestyle into your practice doesn’t mean you have to reveal everything about your personal life, she’s gonna teach you how to communicate through social media in a way that is attractive to the people that you’re looking to, to, to, you know, to have as clients. It’s amazing. It’s a formulated system, it works. She has tons and tons 1000s of people who are already members of this group, so you should do that as well. So we have a special website set up just for gogos bootcamp, which is Go Go podcast, Geo, geo podcast.com, check it out, I never recommend any products is the only product I basically recommend. Because I’ve used it, it’s amazing. And it’s great. And it’ll help you build your business, which is what we’re all trying to do right now is stay in business and grow our business. And this is a great time.

Gogo Bethke 43:14
So thank you, thank you so much.

D.J. Paris 43:16
Thank you and go go thank you for being on our show. As per usual, you’re amazing. We’re so thrilled the listeners love you, the viewers love you and your your missing tooth.

Gogo Bethke 43:25
We all love you even more now.

D.J. Paris 43:28
They do. They do love even more. And so on behalf of gogo and myself, we want to thank the listeners. And by the way, I’m going to ask for a favorite from our listeners. We talked about asking for reviews, why don’t you give us a review, we would appreciate it even if you hate us and you think we’re the worst still write us a review because we want to know how you feel. The easiest way to do that. Go to whatever Podcast Directory you’re using, whether you’re an iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher or Pandora, or Google Play Anywhere, and leave us a review. Let us know how you feel. We appreciate it. It helps us get better, also helps attract more listeners to our show. And so we thank you for that. So on behalf of gogo and myself on the listeners, thank you for continuing to support our show. Thanks for watching and listening and gogo. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

Gogo Bethke 44:17
Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure. Bye

Welcome to our BRAND-NEW monthly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!

Tired of boring “just listed” and “just sold” Instagram posts? Let’s take our Instagram game to the next level through Instagram Stories. In this episode, social media expert Gogo Bethke walks you step-by-step on how to use Instagram Stories to partner with local businesses for giveaways and contests. This will increase engagement and generate more real estate leads for your business. And, best of all, it’s FUN!

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

DISCLAIMER: Gogo’s 30-day moneyback guarantee is no longer available.

Gogo Bethke can be reached at gogosrealestate@gmail.com and at her Instagram account.

Purchase Gogo’s Bootcamp by clicking here – Keeping It Real Podcast listeners get a discount – click now!

Gogo's Bootcamp 2.0

Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the best social media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level. She’s so confident there’s a 30 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose. Keeping it real listeners receive a special discount so please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount and now on with the show.

Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast in the country made for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your host and guide through the show, and we have gogo on our show. Today. She is an Instagram queen and a top 1% Real Estate Agent. She comes on our show every single month to talk about social media strategies. For our listeners. Let me tell you a little bit about Gogo. If you are new to the show, and haven’t yet experienced any of your episodes, by the way, you should go back and listen to all of her episodes. But gogo Becky came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream. She was broke had no sphere of influence, no experience barely spoke English and only $6 to her name. So it left her with nothing else but Facebook at the time. That’s where she started and she created gogos real estate and her real estate career started with the power of social media gogo sold over 45 million in residential real estate transactions. She shares the good, the bad and the ugly side of real estate and her honest snippets in her everyday life earned her 10s of 1000s of social media followers. In the real estate community. She earned the nickname social media queen and after being asked to present at various conferences and realtor events. She has built a social media bootcamp just for you for realtors called gogos bootcamp and for listeners of our podcast we have a special discount. So visit gogo podcast Gogo podcast.com, just for our listeners, gogo Welcome to the show.

Gogo Bethke 2:27
Well, I thank you so much for having me again.

D.J. Paris 2:29
By the way before I almost forgot everyone out there go to Instagram right now and look up gogos real estate geo gos real estate and follow her to see the very one of the very best Instagram accounts I’ve ever seen across all industries. Certainly for real estate, she’s at the top. So anyway, thank you for being part of the show.

Gogo Bethke 2:49
Thank you so much for having me.

D.J. Paris 2:51
Okay, what do we want to talk about this month?

Gogo Bethke 2:55
So I was thinking let’s talk about how to use and abuse the social media or Instagram story features and all of the things that Instagram allows you to do with the power of the story. And let’s see how we can implement that to make money in real estate.

D.J. Paris 3:10
Yeah, that’s a good one too because I know I have an Instagram, non business account a personal account I’ve got about 10,000 followers which is I know not much but I have never personally myself even just for fun try the stories feature. And I know I’m missing out so let’s definitely talk about how realtors can use it all right,

Gogo Bethke 3:30
stories are awesome because it makes you more personal. So stories are only up for 24 hours they kind of go poof after that. They do have a feature that called highlights so you can capture those stories and I’ll talk about it in a little bit. But so it’s just kind of cool to like show who you are and show when it goes down on a day to day basis and show the highs and the lows and the good and the bad and the ugly. And that people really get to know you because when they get to know you then they get to feel a connection and when there is a connection that you’re really not selling them anything they already trust you They already gave you their time their attention and really it just becomes more of a relationship and it’s much easier when they call you that they need you to be the listing agent or buyer’s agent versus you calling strangers and selling yourself and your services. Great. So with stories I now on the other hand, I’ll probably make up for the for the stories that you don’t do. I do about 11 to 14 stories a day, maybe even a little bit more. I’m so much in the habit like accurate this device around this is my office. So for me it’s just grabbing it when something fun is going on or something good is going on. Like yesterday we had an agent that joined our team. We were doing mimosas just to celebrate and my husband was opening the champagne. And so we captured that and a boomerang so when we rang what that is so if you have if you’re driving and listening to this podcasts do not do what I’m saying I’m telling you to do but if you’re not driving, then open up your Instagram account. Feel free to go to Google’s realestate.com to check it out and follow me but if you’re not If you already follow me, then let’s go through the motion of posting a story. So you can see all of the features that I’m talking about. Okay? So stories allows you to record something at the moment in many different ways. And I walked through the features, but it also allows you to post something that’s already on your phone. Okay, if it’s a video, it’s going to break it down to 15 second increments. So if it’s a video, that’s that’s three minutes long, you do have to kind of cut it up into one minute segments. And then you can post it, it automatically cuts it up for you and in 15 minutes increments. But usually, you know, just a soften story, like a selfie style story like this, to shoot it right there. Inside the story feature, in order to access that open up your Instagram, and the bottom of there’s a little house, click that and then as soon as you do on the top left, the camera is going to show up. At the same time, you’re gonna make your first story. Are you ready? I am. Okay, open up Instagram. I’m there. Okay, how is the button in the bottom left? There are a little camera button on the top. Yep, that’s good that and now, is it on selfie mode? Or is that you see,

D.J. Paris 6:04
like, Yeah, I’ll turn it around. Okay, now it’s facing me.

Gogo Bethke 6:08
Okay, now you see a big white round button in the middle? Yes. If you just click it, it’s going to take a photo if you hold it down, or round circle is going to get a red circle is going to go circles. And you can say, Hey, guys, I’m like Pascal’s go great. And I’m so excited. This is my first life.

D.J. Paris 6:25
Hi guys. I am live pot live streaming a podcast right now with gogo of go goes real estate.

Gogo Bethke 6:31
Perfect. Did it go circles? It did they record. Okay, awesome. Now, if you swipe up, so you see your recording. I’m just gonna take a quick picture of myself. Now, if you swipe up on the recording, you see all of the different features and it gives you

D.J. Paris 6:45
Oh, yeah, I did not know that was a thing.

Gogo Bethke 6:48
Yeah. So now you can ask them a question. So for example, quick the question. And then right on there the type of you know, go go. Do

D.J. Paris 7:00
you know, go go? Okay, got it.

Gogo Bethke 7:03
Cool. Oh, so that could be an option. Now, if you don’t like what you’ve been doing, you can just hold down on that status you hold right down into your trash.

D.J. Paris 7:13
Oh, yeah. That’s really cool. I

Gogo Bethke 7:16
like that. Now we’re gonna we can do a poll. So pull off again. Yep. Cool feature. Yep, I see it. Yeah. So now you can say Do you know, though? And now you have the option of doing yes or no? That is so cool. And now these people can answer the question. So you kind of keep them entertained. But now we are talking about how to generate leads, because that’s what’s going to pay the bills for us. features, you can use them for two more many different reasons. But the two that are very important for us is organic growth, which requires correspondence interaction between you and your followers, because that’s how you’re going to grow organically. So that’s why you do all of these swipes and things like that. That’s where the growth side, because you want to be organic eyeballs on your business. Those are your future potential customers. The next way you want to do this, you want to have direct access to the consumer, meaning you want to find out, for example, let’s say you create a cute little video. And you say, Hey, guys, I’m just wondering, we are early in 2020, just before the spring season, who’s thinking about selling this year? Okay, then you put that questionnaire up here the same poll? Yes or no? So then you say, are you thinking about selling? Yes or no? Now, all of the people that answered Yes. What are you gonna do? Yeah, reach out to every single one of them. That simple cloth, you can do that on device set. So these questionnaires you can think of any question, and voila, you get the answers. You can also do giveaways, you can also do swipe ups for collecting email addresses. So for example, let’s say you are talking about your lead, lead tracker, how much you love your lead tracker sheet, and you can share it with everyone. And then you just do a quick little video and say, Hey, guys, I love my tracker. If you want a copy of it, just put your email address right here. So then,

D.J. Paris 9:04
you cannot do polls in regular postings, right only in stories,

Gogo Bethke 9:09
you can do regular posting, but people tend to spend more time on stories because it’s more interactive, and it’s quicker. So people have the average of a memory span of a goldfish about three seconds, you’ve got their attention span. So if whatever you’re posting is longer, it’s not going to show up also on a business page, your actual feed when you turn these accounts so everything that I’m sharing here, I’m assuming that you have a business page. Okay, on a personal page, many of these features are not available. Also you cannot run ads, you cannot reach the masses, you cannot reach strangers because you can throw money at it you can build an ad. So I’m assuming that you already have a business page

D.J. Paris 9:45
and everyone listening if you have a current Instagram account, you can possibly convert it to a business account as well.

Gogo Bethke 9:51
Very simple. You go into settings and in your accounts and you turn it from a personal to business account.

D.J. Paris 9:56
And doesn’t Instagram currently prioritize Stories. Isn’t that a huge push? So in other words, that is typically going to get more eyeballs than even your traditional postings.

Gogo Bethke 10:07
Correct? Correct. So using abuse stories, so let’s go through many of the features. You can do lives and events. So let’s say you’re at an event, like, let’s say your brokerage is throwing a big event and you want the world to know, okay, you should definitely go live and let them have an insider view. Like even if they can attend in person, let them see what it’s like they see what it’s about. So they will come next time because they don’t want to miss out. They may open houses, if you’re sitting in an open house, and you’re totaling your times, because nobody’s coming through guess what you should be doing, you should be live on Instagram. And you should automatically have your Instagram to feed to Facebook. So everything I post on Instagram, because I have business pages on both they are linked. You must link it. So you turn it into a business page, and you link it to your Facebook business page. That way you’re doing one thing and getting two platforms on at the same time.

D.J. Paris 10:53
That’s awesome. Because right now we’re live streaming on Facebook, but we’re not live streaming on Instagram. It Are there any restrictions for live streaming as far as a length of time that you can be?

Gogo Bethke 11:05
Not that I know of? No. Right? Yeah. So you should be able to just go as long as you want my understanding. Okay, wonderful. Um, you can also do polls. So for example, those are cute. Let’s say you have a new listing that’s coming on the market. And then you can say, okay, whoever guesses the price that this home is going to be listed for which you give them three or four options. Whoever gets it right or out of the people that you get right the price, and it’s going to be listed out, I’m going to give away a $25 Starbucks card. So now that’s just an interaction with your audience. So that grows you organically. And also, it helps you to kind of see who’s active, maybe looking for homes on the market. Capture them because it shows everybody that voted no, everybody that voted yes, everybody voted ABCD like all of that, it gives you the actual data in the background. And that’s the other awesome part about having a business page, because there’s what’s called Insight. So you actually get to see your numbers in the background, how many men woman following you? What time of the day? Where are they from? know all that stuff. So you know how to when to when to tackle them, I guess. giveaways are huge. Now, an awesome way of doing some of the local growth is to do giveaways, we talked about this last time that your local companies you can go when you’re doing the giveaways with them, you can go live again, when the winner accepts the gaps that that is even more important than going live initially, because they do want to, there’s so much fake stuff out there that the people probably not going to partake in your giveaways at first, because they want to make sure that you actually giving their stuff away. So when you go live and they see your stuff, your giveaways, and then they see what the other party receives, then they’re going to start partaking. So it’s just like think of it like postcards. When we used to do mailers, everybody knows it’s going to take at least eight times before that registers in their brain, and they’re going to take you seriously. So same with Instagram, you’re not going to make one post and then the the leads are just piling again, it’s going to take some time. So I look at it. It’s my job. I don’t cold call out into mailers. So it is my job. That’s what I do for generating leads. You can do less than for example, or swipe up video and say, Hey, are you thinking about buying? If so fill out this form below. And then it’s going to say yes, buying thinking about 123 months, three to six months, six to 12 months, and they get to choose, they got to just pick it and what you do again, you follow up with every single person that click those buttons. Tag location, always, always always tag location that people you are wet. And so let me show you how that works. So let’s say we create actually, this is awesome because I can tag you now that you’re in it. And so they can see the actual work. Okay, guys, so I am live right now, with keeping a real podcast with the best podcast DJ called DJ Paris,

D.J. Paris 13:45
certainly the coolest guy

Gogo Bethke 13:48
I would say so. So all their audience they are the largest real estate podcast in the nation and so honored to be a part of it. Today we are learning about how to use Instagram stories and the swipe up features and all of the features to generate leads for yourself and grow an organic audience. And it is learning right now how to use polls and things like that. So I wanted for everybody to see how this is getting done. And in about a week you can go and listen in go to keepin it real podcast and you can actually hear the whole story. Great. Okay, now we’re gonna do a swipe up. We can do we can tag you. So talking about tagging people. The reason why you want to do that because you want to grow your organic audience. So now everybody you said you had 10,000 followers, I have 43,000 followers. So now your 10,000 gets to see me and my 43,000 gets to see you because I thank you. So now you organically grow. This is what it’s called organic growth. So DJ Paris, what is your your Instagram?

D.J. Paris 14:46
Yeah, t f p. So Thomas, Frank Paul, and then humor blog. It’s from my old old humor website that I used to have and I’m going to be creating a keeping it real podcast Instagram account in the next week or so, but we’ll use the my old one for now.

Gogo Bethke 15:02
Sounds good. Okay, so I tagged you now you can use hashtags. So hashtags are like search words. Okay? So think about if I was searching for something on Google, what would I type in? So if I’m searching for something on Instagram, what do I type in? So right now, I use the hashtag feature, if you can see it on the screen. So I probably use hashtag and you literally type in what this is about. So this is this is keeping it real. Okay, yep. So let’s say you’re doing something about newest listing, you hashtag is going to be my newest listing, or let’s say you’re doing something homes for sale, or whatever that you are posting about that you want people to find it that way. Or you can say, Brighton, Michigan, Brighton homes for sale, because that’s what your listing is at. Now, you always want to tell the location in the real estate post for this course, location doesn’t matter. So I’m not going to tag it because you want to reach the masses. But if let’s say you’re doing a post about your newest listing in Brighton, Michigan, you definitely want to swipe up and you definitely want to tag the location. The reason why is that the people who already follow you, they’re gonna see your story no matter what, whether people who don’t follow you, but they follow Brighton, Michigan, or they’re just searching for anything in that area, they’ll go in to see your post.

D.J. Paris 16:15
And you know, the nice part about Instagram is that it shows you how many posts per hashtag are currently available. So you can actually do research to see, okay, well, I’m live in Brighton, Michigan, and I’m going to be posting something specific to people in Brighton, Michigan. What are the bright Michigan, Mike Brighton, Michigan hashtags that are most popular? Because you can see what other people have done just by starting to type in different different words and hashtags.

Gogo Bethke 16:42
Exactly. Good job. I love hashtags, because hashtags generate eyeballs and business to you. So you use it on a music. Okay, tag location, tag people questions. So we cover that you can use the question part for anything. So for example, I do a lot of coaching. And that’s my favorite time when I’m in the air. Now, I cannot do videos and things like that. But usually when I’m flying, and I know I’m going to be up there for four or five hours and nothing to do, I post a quick little little video and say, you know, type away ask me anything you want to know. And then I put that little question thing up there. So you do the video, you do the swipe up people in question. And then they can type away anything. So let’s say using it for the buyer side, or let’s say you have a buyer one on one, free, something that you’re giving away, okay, like a printout. You can say, Hey, guys, I have my buyers one, one tip, but put your email address right in here. If you’re a buyer on the market today, include your email address, I will shoot it over to you. Or let’s say you might say, Hey, guys, I have done over 100, buy sell transaction negotiated multiple bidding situation multiple times over. And I’m pretty proud to say I win pretty much all the time. So ask me anything about the value process I’m here for I’m here to answer it. So do you do the swipe? You do the question little box? They can actually type in their question. And then you can respond to that question and share it with everybody. You can do a type of response, you can do a video response, video responses, or even better. Now also, if somebody asks you something by side related question, do you think they’re in the market to buy a home? Of course, then you’re gonna follow up with them and turn them into a buyer and win them over? So there’s so many ways that you can turn somebody so many What do they say so many ways to skin a cat? Sure, is to find buyers and sellers. And it’s interactive, and it’s fun, and it’s more personal. And also,

D.J. Paris 18:24
let’s pause for a second and realize that I don’t know the percentage of realtors that take advantage of Instagram stories. And if they do, they’re likely just posting about their own lives and not necessarily interacting directly with the their followers, which is what really we’re talking about is you are going to be the only broker the only realtor that is doing that. So you’re asking, Hey, I’m here for the next hour, I’m answering questions about sell side transactions or whatever. And now people get to ask questions. Nobody else is doing that.

Gogo Bethke 18:59
As simple as let’s say you are doing your newest listing come in on the market and you go in over there and you can ask them like, do you guys think we should paint this? I think we should paint this What color do you think would be best, right? Interactive, they’re seeing your hustle they’re seeing your work and and you’re out their heart and you’re involved in them in your business. And people like to partake and feel important and feel like they made a decision and help you succeed. So that is another way of you can do in that countdown. We also have a countdown portion. So let’s say doing events where you have your open house this weekend. That is the biggest baddest luxury 17 bedroom a property bubble and you want the world to know you can do that you can do a countdown, talk about the open house or include maybe a cute little video that you created a marketing video created for the property and then do a countdown and just say Open House and literally you put in Saturday from 11 to two and it’s going to show them the countdown of how much time is left. When they click it they can actually opt in and be reminded of that event. Brilliant. That’s amazing. Swipe up feature. Now you said you have 10,000 followers so you Then swipe up, and you can actually take them directly to the lead. Now that’s a huge feature. And I use it all the time. And it does help our business tremendously because you’re taking traffic from somewhere that you’re talking about to the actual direct link. So if it’s an event, I can just say swipe up and register was that simple, but you do have to have a registered account, which, sorry, not a registered account, what is it called a little logo that is verified, verified account, thank you, you do have to have a verified account. If you don’t have that, then you have to have a minimum of 10,000 followers. So people would qualify, but most people, they’re not there just yet. So they have these organic steps to get there. As soon as they get there, then they can do the swipe ups and register now, even if you don’t have 10,000. And even if you’re not verified, you can still use the swipe up, if you create an ad and pay for it, then you can take them directly to a site, just FYI. But if you’re just doing it organically as like a quick something, then always generate them back to your bio link. So if you go to my Instagram and you go to my bio, you go to go go back to that calm. That’s only one in there, you will see that one has everything that I do. Yeah, that’s my sellers, my buyers, my events, my podcast, and I attend if you want to invite me to one if you want to invite me to an event, you know if you want to partner with me with the UFC, if you want to learn more about the UFC, everything that I do, because as realtors, we are a lot of hats. So I needed a site that is interactive allows me to put videos on there. So for my sellers, when they click it, they can actually see previous videos that we have done for our sellers and all the beautiful properties that I had the pleasure of selling, I do professional videography and photography, no customized sellers. So when a seller goes on there, I want them to see what they get when they get to work with me. So when you do a swipe up, or when you don’t have the ability to do the swipe up, but you want to generate them over to a site, you can type it onto the screen, or you can say go to my bio and the link is in my bio.

D.J. Paris 21:48
Or you can also put the link in the comments as well.

Gogo Bethke 21:52
Yes, but Instagram does not like you to take them away from Instagram. So if you’re typing a.com, your post is not going to rank high because you typed in an other www. So if you just tell them to go to your bio, which they do allow you to have one link on there. If you like my goal, go back to that camp site, it is an awesome, it’s a click funnel based site, you can just go to the bottom of that and say I like this, I want one just like it, I want to say it’s $19 a month. And you can customize it how ever you want to whatever links you want to have in there, whatever videos you want to have in there, if you want to have to have different steps because you do a lot of things. Maybe you’re an investor, maybe you you know, have your own podcast, whatever you have, you can plug it in there. And just this way you’re taking them to one link and anything they can possibly need from you is on there. So always make sure that you generate them, or you take them to a site where you generate income.

D.J. Paris 22:45
Yeah, that’s really smart. So we have a similar thing for the podcast. So as everyone who’s listening knows, there are a lot of ways to access podcasts, you can go to iTunes, you can go to Google Play, if you’re an Android user, you can go to Stitcher, you can go to Spotify, Pandora now, pretty much all these different apps, and they’re always changing. So we have a similar page for our podcasts that say, here are all the ways to subscribe to our podcast, instead of creating unique links for every single one, they just go to well, they just can go right from our website, keeping real pod.com. But it’s got all those links on there, because otherwise it would just be too difficult to try to push people to all those various sites.

Gogo Bethke 23:21
Yeah. Next one. And mine is reviews. Now reviews are very important. And I strongly recommend that you have Google reviews. So you get reviews from your clients. As you close one of our steps. When we close the file, Christy just send them an email has all of our links and we ask them, please write one review, and just go to these things and copy and paste. Okay, so those of us are very important. But now, imagine I posted a five star review that it’s a blah, blah, blah in writing. And imagine that I posted of selfie style video where my client is telling you in a 15 second video how much you love working with me, which one would convince you more video, video. Now the cool part is when you do that video, you can also test them. So then the consumer and the other and the person who’s watching can see that they are real human being they can go to their profile and see who they are. And people are so like, oh Jessica, what with you, I guess I work with you. So that kind of does that. And then also because if you have this feature turned on it’s called Let me just find it very quick.

Save to archive feature it’s called. So when you create these videos, you turn on your save to archive feature, it’s always going to be there because otherwise this video goes away and every 24 hours they go poof if you have the Save save to archive feature on there. Now you can go back and create different highlights. So when you go on someone’s profile and you see all these little bubbles and their profile that shows you all of the story style videos they’ve created but they saved and it’s going to be up there forever so it’s not going to disappear after 24 hours. So let’s say you create yourself a highlight that’s called reviews. Every time you had a closing table everybody congratulate each other everybody’s happy they got a key you got some money you can do Take a quick little video where they leaving a review about you how much they love working with you, you’re then going to go to your archives, you’re going to plug it right into your review, highlight little folder. So all of your video style reviews are going to be in your remote folder. So when somebody goes to check out your profile and see if you’re real and how you really work and yada, yada, they can just go there and watch people tell them in person almost face to face, how awesome it was to work with you.

D.J. Paris 25:26
That’s brilliant. I love it. Good.

Gogo Bethke 25:32
Okay, you can use tools to make this all credit. So they’re not created right there in the moment. You can do Canva, which is awesome, allows you to just create kind of like flyers, but it’s a full screen and doesn’t look like a PDF file.

D.J. Paris 25:45
Yeah, we use Canva for all of our artwork for everything related to our podcast. And we are a huge, huge Canva by the way, that’s canva.com it’s completely free. It’s the best is actually created by a couple of Australian women. I think we got a kit. Yeah, go to canva.com. It’s just the it’s amazing. If you have no even if you have no, you know graphic design skills, they do it all for you. It’s amazing. Yeah,

Gogo Bethke 26:09
it’s amazing. So we use Canva for that. And then story art. That’s just another one of like, so it’s a full screen photo and just animates things for you things can pop up. So it just keeps it more interactive. And I that’s what I have for today.

D.J. Paris 26:24
Wonderful. I’m also I you know, you just inspired me to talk about this on a future episode, I want to spend some time talking about Google My Business. So we know that real estate, of course is hyperlocal. Google, my business is the Google results that show up that show your business we talked about gogo said, Get a Google review, guys, I cannot emphasize how important Google is prioritizing reviews and your local business page. So we maybe on a future episode, we’ll talk more about that because you can do video there as well. Obviously, there’s there’s written and you can also do blog posts, right in your Google, every seven days, they disappear, kind of like Instagram stories, they disappear every seven days, you can go to Canva, you can create a still image of something you want to promote. And then it’ll show up and Google will prioritize it when people are searching. So we can talk about how to how to optimize that for going going forward.

Gogo Bethke 27:17
In the bootcamp, I have an actual whole episode about how to create how to set everything up for Google My Business, how to do your reviews, and make sure that the audits get posted in there because it is it is I don’t know if you knew that. But Google is the number one site that people visit. I do I do. A second, Instagram is third. So you want to definitely be present on all of those streets free marketing, it’s free eyeballs on your business. And reviews are you know, people are going to check you out to make sure you have it.

D.J. Paris 27:44
Let’s talk about the bootcamp because this it just got a huge facelift and and a refresh. And let’s talk about what’s included, so that people can learn all of what we just talked about in about a million times more on how to actually run their social media. So can you talk about the over 20

Gogo Bethke 28:01
hours of video training. It starts truly with the very basics of social media, what you should do, what you do not do how to set everything up, why you should do certain things, because many people like even though this comes very easy to me, many people they don’t they feel overwhelmed, they don’t even know where to start. So I literally break down step by step process. Also now we have so as we grow because we started as we started working together a few months now, as we grow, we add anchoring. So the features of the bootcamp change. So now we have a new added feature, which is a Facebook group, everyone at once every month, we do a live training where me and my digital marketers semi do an hour training. And I kind of call it like you’re building your social media house. So we just had our very first month training last month in January. And I called it that was the foundation that was the very, very basics, I kind of forced them to create a story video, I forced them to turn their accounts into business accounts, I forced them to link their accounts together, I forced them to take a video and send it out to all of their friends, there’s like actual work that you’re going to have to do, including the homework and then they hold you to it. And then the next month, we do build on that. And then we build on that. Now granted, you can join the straight and get anytime everything is recorded. So you can just go back to the first one and start on your own time however you want to. Now it’s not just social media, it’s pretty much everything that I do. It’s all of the systems it’s all of the databases and the CRM programs and when to hire an assistant and what is my Open House strategy and and how to build a team where to even start what are the systems for that how to do a DISC assessment, what is the DISC assessment? Should you even do a risk assessment? You don’t I mean like those kinds of how to make passive income, how to grow that scale that to seven digits, and just pretty much everything from the startup agent, the brand new all the way me now nine years in and how I got everything that I literally share everything down to my marketing agreement, to my lead tracker, you name it, everything I do is in there. Now also all of my vendors are in there. Everybody that I use and other systems and companies that I used to run this they I still get my discounted price because now there’s hundreds and 1000s of us, they get a lower price if they went to that same company on their own. I also teach them after they’ve grown their business, and they have the organic following and stuff, how to monetize on that. Because it’s all good. Of course, in the end of the day, we want commissions, because that’s what goes into pays the bills. But eventually, Warren Buffett says, if you can figure out a way how to make money while you’re sleeping, you’ll never be rich. So eventually you get to a point in your career, then you’re going to run out of time, you’re going to hit your personal ceiling. And that’s when you need to leverage and that’s when you need to take other people and grow a team. But you also need to then figure out how you can leverage that organic growth, how you can turn it into money. And that’s where the affiliate links come in, where I teach you how you should never really promote about some somebody else’s business or some other local this or local that or any any other product that you may personally use. And even if you love it, for the traffic for the sales that you’re going to generate to their site, you should be paid for. Yes. And that’s an affiliate link. And that’s a passive income. Now I have tons and tons of passive income my random checks showing up from real estate companies from agents that decide to go get into real estate because I mean, they use my link to sign up with it. So the company says if it wasn’t for me, monologue and all the my stories and doing a swipe up and taking the traffic over to their site, they would have not generated that sale. So you can get in average between 10 to 25% of the sales that you generate for that product or system or service.

D.J. Paris 31:26
Yeah, and guys, I am working with gogo for a future module bonus module to help everyone listening, consider creating a hyperlocal podcast for your market. And I can show you how to get affiliate links sponsorships as well. So that your podcast hosting and some of your equipment and all that can get paid for through the same idea. So a great, awesome idea.

Gogo Bethke 31:49
That reminds me the Amazon link. So I don’t know if you knew that, but you can become an Amazon affiliate. So all of the products, we’ll be talking about the microphone that yours I can just say, hey, go to my Amazon link. It’s right in there. Buy it.

D.J. Paris 32:01
Yeah. And my microphones like $400. That would be a nice little commission.

Gogo Bethke 32:07
Yeah. So so many ways to generate income. And my goal is to have fun while you’re doing it, you know, have multiple sources of income, so you don’t have to worry about your family and how you’re going to go on spring break this year.

D.J. Paris 32:23
Yeah, 100%. So guys, everyone who’s listening, I encourage you, I could not encourage you more. To check out Go Go’s boot camps, we have a special website that will direct you to Go Go’s to give you a discount for the bootcamp, which is Gogo podcast.com. So visit Gogo podcast.com to get a special link just for a special discount rather, just for our now viewers and listeners. Because of course now we’re doing video two and gogo is the one that pushed me to do video. So I am not just somebody who brings go go on because she’s got great information. I am a student of hers as well. So my next thing is to get an Instagram account going for our website

Gogo Bethke 33:01
for CEU. To that I’m gonna do it myself, I’m gonna like give me a password, I set it all up.

D.J. Paris 33:07
I might just let you do that.

Gogo Bethke 33:10
But I forgot to mention oh my gosh, one of the largest parts of the bootcamp and what we changed up in December for my birthday. So send me my digital marketer. Now I do everything organically. I teach the organic side of growth and the organic side of lead generation. Sammy teaches you how to do it with Facebook ads, Google ads, all of those chatbots yada yada he has his own courses over 100 video I think videos of literally breaking everything down he will not only teach you how to build the app but give you the actual verbiage that works he can generate seller leads from five to $10 apiece. Now imagine what’s the average commission you make? annalistic Yeah, that’s a no brainer. Almost $7,500 So if that’s the case, you just spent $10 to get a listing by side you can do even cheaper it’s unbelievable. So now Sam This course is a part of Google’s boot camp so now it’s your choice if you want to do it organically if you want to do it through Facebook ads and throw some money at it or maybe you meet yourself halfway and say you know what I do some organically i That way I have to spend less and ads because I can touch mine organically and then I spend a little bit to charge the people that don’t know about me yet.

D.J. Paris 34:14
Brilliant Yeah, this this is a course that not only is obviously the value you get is outstanding but it’s constantly evolving right she’s constantly Go Go’s enter team are constantly adding more features more training more knowledge. So it really is a steal for the price

Gogo Bethke 34:33
changes that algorithm about every five minutes so I’m like okay, there we go. You have to add on an add on. But it is I mean, we have to evolve like things that works in 2019 on social media they no longer work in 2020 or don’t I can say they no longer one doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to work in 2020 so as they change we have to change and adapt because if not you’re a dinosaur if you’re dinosaur you’re gonna go extinct.

D.J. Paris 34:57
Yeah, I agree. And guys, we all So gogo comes on once a month to answer your questions. So we need your questions. So please let us know what you would like us to cover in future episodes. What questions do you have for Gogo? Related anything related to social media? Or affiliate relationships or just setting up your business online? What’s the digital side? And we have at our firm, because I work at a real estate firm, we have 650 brokers. The number one question I get is, can you help me with my social media? Well, that’s, and I always tell everyone, you know what, go to Go Go’s bootcamp. Buy it, it’s the best investment you’ll make. And

Gogo Bethke 35:37
sorry to interrupt I went live on keepin it real to see if we have actual comments.

D.J. Paris 35:42
Gotcha. So I want everyone to send us your comments. There’s a number of ways you can do that. Obviously, if you’re watching this live on Facebook, you can send us comments there. If you’re listening to this on your podcast app, reach out to us visit our website keeping it real pod.com You can send us comments there. Also everyone please follow us on Facebook facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod and soon to be on Instagram as well. But every single day on our Facebook page, not only do well one every single day we post an article that we find online designed to help you grow your business. That’s our commitment to you is every single day one article that will help you and then of course, we’re promoting these episodes as well there so facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod. We’ll keep you up to date on everything going on with the podcast. Also go to Instagram right now and follow gogo gogos real estate. So again, Instagram and follow gogos real estate search for it, you’ll find it super easy. And also if you want to see what gogo is all about, you can visit our website gogo, Beth ki.com We’ll put all those links in the show notes for the episode. So guys, you can find everything there and go directly to the bootcamp as well as go goes Instagram and everywhere else. She is right from our show notes in the episode. So one last thing, guys, if everyone out there just tells one other realtor about this podcast and about gogo we will essentially double our listenership and our viewership will be able to help more and more brokers achieve whatever their level of success is. And this is why we do the show. It’s something we do. It’s a passion for us we want to help. So just think of one other real estate agent that would benefit from hearing from people like gogo, send them this podcast, you’ll be doing them a huge favor. And that does us a favor too, because it increases our listenership. And it allows us to do more episodes and support more people. So gogo, thank you, once again, you are amazing. We love having you on the show. You are a listener favorite. And we are so grateful that you take time out of your busy month to, you know, to be on the show. And we will see you again next month. So unburied. On behalf of the listeners, gogo thank you on behalf of gogo and myself. Everyone who’s listening, thank you so much telephoned support, go go buy her boot camp, I bought it, it’s an absolute steal, it’s a great investment. And it will just help you grow your business. And even even if it only helped you get one additional sale you would make you’d make a ton a great return. But it won’t just do that it’ll actually help you build a business. And that’s even more importantly, you’ll the sales will come that won’t be a problem. But you’ll actually have a social media platform that works for you. Instead of you always wondering kind of what should I be doing? I know I should be doing more. I’m not sure what let go go teach you. She takes all the legwork out of it, she tells you exactly what to do.

Gogo Bethke 38:25
And I seriously break it down like baby steps. Like if I’m talking to a five year old of how you need to do this. Now we have a comment NPR, Jen said help I need to happen. I forgot to mention this spot. We are coming out with a dark do it for you service. So where are they going to get access to the whole boot camp, when they can do everything organically. But if they feel overwhelmed, and they want us to just do you know what just set it up for me. And all I need to do is post from now on, we’ll also come coming out with that it’s not ready just yet when it is you’ll be the first to know, and we’ll share it with them. But that’s also an option. And there somebody asked, is there a way to automate Instagram post the own if I pronounced your name right as that and the and there is there are many, many services that you can pre schedule to post your Instagram posts. Now, I will strongly not recommend that. The reason why is because Instagram really does not like to report third party services. And you would have to give access to that third party service to have access to your account in order to post in your behalf. And a and b depending what kind of automated you’re talking about. If you’re talking about that you pre create the post and it’s personalized and the system was posted for you at a certain time. I guess use it but I still wouldn’t recommend and you have your cell phone and it’s gonna take you really three minutes to edit the photo type of everything you want to say tag the location tell the people you’re with it, use some hashtags, you can pre record your hashtags and a notes in your phone so go to notes and just put in all the hashtags that apply to your business locally. Like go go go go get back to Google’s you know set homes for sale luxury, luxury homes for sale Brighton, Brighton, Michigan, pretty much everything that applies to you, these are the ones that I use personally, everything that applies to you, you pre write those hashtags. So then when you’re making your posts, you just go to your notes, Copy, Paste while I made a post in three minutes. Now, if you’re talking about the services that are automated, meaning it’s not personalized post, everybody who uses that service is going to have the same posts on the profile that day, I strongly do not recommend that we are not posting to post guys we are posting to make money. Okay, so if I take in consideration all of the posts that I’ve made in my career, if I break it down, it’s probably about 40 bucks a post. Now, that doesn’t sound much. But if I actually made 40 bucks in three minutes for making that post, the way I look at it, not every post is going to generate you are by buyer or seller or if you’re selling a product, I mean, but over time, as they see just like your postcard so so A times they’re gonna buy from you. Okay, so that’s why you do it and don’t automate it, I remove something else from your plate that you feel like you don’t have the time for social media. And if you decide to do social media, that would be about you. Because we don’t have real estate. We sell our services. We sell us, I sell me you saw you. If you don’t sell you your social media is not going to work.

D.J. Paris 41:15
Well, that’s a perfect ending to a great episode. So guys, just to be clear, what that person was asking was should I use things like Buffer HootSuite, we would say try not to because number one, we believe Instagram doesn’t prioritize those posts because they want you on their platform posting. Yes, you can technically do it through third party solutions, but we think your results will be much better and honestly, it doesn’t take any more time to post directly into Instagram. It takes actually I the exact same amount of time. That’s a good point. I love that. All right, guys, we’re gonna end on this episode, let us know what you want us to cover on our next episode, which is coming in a month. Thank you everyone for listening. Gogo. Thank you and everyone. If you want to buy Go Go’s bootcamp at a discount, go to Gogo podcast.com and you’ll get a discount just for our listeners. So thank you go go. And we will see you next month.

Gogo Bethke 42:09
Thank you so much.

Welcome to our BRAND-NEW monthly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!

Gogo Bethke is the author of Gogo’s Bootcamp, the #1 real estate social media training program in the industry. She came to the U.S. with no money, no sphere of influence and no experience. Within a few years Gogo became a top 1% producer through her social media strategies. She’ll be on the show each month teaching you how to drive more business through social media. Today’s topic – what realtors ® should be doing in 2020 to increase their Instagram effectiveness.

To sign up for Gogo’s Bootcamp, click here!

DISCLAIMER: Gogo’s 30-day moneyback guarantee is no longer available.

Gogo Bethke can be reached at gogosrealestate@gmail.com and at her Instagram account.

Gogo's Bootcamp 2.0

Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:00
Today’s episode of Keeping it real podcast is brought to you by nest egg. Looking to add value to your investor clients recommend nest egg a Chicago based app that has everything your clients need to manage their rentals in only minutes a month. Nest Egg is the only app that gets things done at the rental including on demand maintenance, and services like tenant placement and snow removal. Also nest egg is free to use which makes your clients investments 20 to 30% more profitable. Join nest egg today by downloading the app or by visiting mistake dot rent. That’s nest egg dot rent, use promo code keeping it real to get your first hour of maintenance for free. And now on to the show.

Hello, and welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast in the country made by real estate agents for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide, and host through the show and we’re just about ready to have gogo from gogos bootcamp.com. Come on and talk about social media and what Realtors need to be doing in 2020 to up their social media game. Before we get to go go, I’m asking everyone for a huge favor. Could you think of just one realtor, one real estate agent that you know that could benefit from listening to top 1% producers? Right? Of course you can we all know at least one who’s eager to learn but maybe doesn’t exactly know how to get those tips and strategies from the very best producers. Well, this is what this podcast is all about. If you’re listening you already know that but a lot of brokers don’t yet know about the show. So if everyone goes out there and just tells one other person that will double our listenership we’ll be able to do more episodes. Just this month alone, we have 12 episodes booked and scheduled and ready. So this is our year 2020 to literally double the number of episodes we’re going to provide. So we’re asking you to help us double our audience. So just think of one broker one realtor that could use this kind of information, pass it along, we’d greatly appreciate it. Also, if you’re a sponsor or you have a product or service that Realtors need to know about we are taking sponsorships. So reach out to us visit keeping it real pod.com and you can send us a message and our sponsorship team will get back in touch with you. Also, we have a new casting director Her name is Ana She’s amazing. So if you know another broker anywhere in the country, that would be a great fit for our show. Send her a note you can do that also through our website where you can of course listen to every episode we’ve already ever done. And also follow us on Facebook visit facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod and every single day we send an article that we found online that is designed to help you grow your business okay guys, that’s enough for me let’s get on to our episode with Gogo.

Okay, today on the show, we have to go go back keep GO GO came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream she was broke, had no sphere of influence, no experience, barely spoke English and with only $6 to her name. So that left her with nothing else but Facebook to grow her business. And that’s where she started, she created gogos real estate and her real estate career began with the power of social media gogo has sold over 45 million in residential real estate transactions. She shares the good, the bad and the ugly side of real estate and her honest snippets into her everyday life have earned her 10s of 1000s of followers on social media and in the real estate community and she earned the nickname the social media queen. Now after being asked to present at various realtor events. She has built a social media bootcamp called Go Go’s Bootcamp for realtors, you can find that Go Go’s bootcamp.com Today she has a team of 130 agents by the way. Last time we did this she had a team of 106 So that’s how quickly she is growing and she’s growing nation wide. Her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate on social media. If she can do it, this girl from Transylvania Romania with no US education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience and an accent then you can definitely do it to follow go go on Instagram at gogos that’s Gee Oh gee, OH S Go Go’s real estate. And we’ll post links to that as well. Anyway, welcome to the show again. Go go.

Gogo Bethke 4:49
Well, thank you for having me. I love it. It’s exciting.

D.J. Paris 4:52
We’re super excited to have you Thanks. Your your last episode was one of our I think it was our third most listen to episode ever, which is super big for us. And we’re so excited you’re back with us. So what do you want to talk about today? Oh, hold on before it before I’m interrupt you. I apologize before we have to talk about your new programs you just updated Go Go’s bootcamp.

Gogo Bethke 5:18
Yeah. So we updated go was boot camp for a couple reasons. A because I, even though I do everything organically, so I don’t run ads. And I will tell you, when I do run ads, it’s a little bit different. I run ads for events. Sometimes most of my events fill up organically. But if they don’t, then we run a couple events to fill up the seats. And then I also run ads for Google Ads bootcamp. But other than that, I don’t run ads. So everything is that I do is organic. But some agents through experience after buying the original goggles, boot camp, they want to throw some money at it, they want to throw 10 bucks a day and run an ad and how should they do that? So my digital marketer, Sammy has a class for that. It’s called finance digital media. And he is that’s what he teaches, he teaches how to build that brand, and how to lead generate and how to get eyeballs and everything that you’re posting, with the power of Facebook and Instagram and running ads in stories and in your feed and things like that. So that got added to the boot camp for pretty much the same price that we were running for my birthday. And I think the the birthday special is still up. So you get that then on top of it. We added a private Facebook group only for boot camp members. So everybody that purchased at any point, I mean, I used to have my bootcamp at $49. So back in the day, when I was slowly building it for everybody who trusted me at that time and purchased that they get access now to everything that I came out with ever since. And so also when they purchase it, now they get access to the to the Facebook group. And once a month, we are going to do live training where myself and Sandy, my digital marketer will set in and we’ll have a different subject. And we’ll start from the basics. So the very first training is the 27th of this month, I think it’s at one o’clock in the afternoon, Eastern Time. And then everybody comes on live. And then we start from the ground up where I literally walk you through how to build up your profiles, and what to do what not to do. And then everyone just we add on and on and on until you have everything that I have. And that’s going to be a 12 month series.

D.J. Paris 7:19
Awesome. Well, everyone should check that out. You also just go to Go Go’s boot camp.com. And she has a wonderful website and explains in great detail, and there’s a money back guarantee, so there’s nothing to lose, right? If it makes sense, you’re going to stay with it. And it will make sense because it makes sense for the 1000s of people that are already members. And you know, on our show, I do not promote things lightly. I almost never promote anything. And this is about the best thing I’ve seen out there, especially in the realm of social media. So definitely check it out Go Go’s boot camp.com. So what are we going to talk about today is it’s now 2020.

Gogo Bethke 7:58
Yeah, so that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about what’s new in 2020, when it comes to social media, what works or maybe that work last year, it doesn’t work anymore. And so you kind of just like anything else, any systems and, and processes that you may be using. And you might have been successful with that in the past, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to work in 2020. So figured let’s go through some of the changes that the algorithm changes and things like that, that Facebook and Instagram has implemented so that you can adjust with the time so you can have just as successful if not more successful, you’re in 2020 that you did before. Great. How’s that sound? Sounds good. Okay. So if you don’t mind, I’m just kind of going through my notes and just kind of blurring out the ideas that are the notes that I took here. So giveaways are very, very, very important. From now on. Instagram, especially and Facebook, if you look at my Facebook, it’s only I think 3000 followers, it’s really hard to grow a Facebook page, because Facebook only allows 2% of your followers, the already followers to actually see your post.

D.J. Paris 9:00
Right. And this is important. Let’s I want to say this again. So if you have a group or a page, specific to your business, or even just your friends, the people that follow you or who like your page only on average, two, or maybe 3% of your lucky of those people who follow you are actually going to

Gogo Bethke 9:18
see that button and they said I’m interested in and I want to see what God was going to post from now on. Even though they showed interest, Facebook only going to show it to 2%. So if you’re 100 people, two of them are going to see it, it’s going to show up in their feed. So the reason why they do that is because when you turn it into a page, the reason why they allow you to reach people that you can’t organically and unnatural on your organic page is because they want you to advertise, they want you to throw money at it. So yeah, you have the ability to reach strangers and get their eyeballs but I want you to pay for it kind of scenario. So it’s kind of hard to grow it organically. But the one way that you can and it’s very very effective and you can get hundreds of followers well granted depending where you’re at as giveaway As and our business as realtors, we have local businesses. So I don’t sell in Chicago even though I can through my team, but I won’t do that. So if I’m trying to generate local leads, you want local followers for that. So the very the one of the very best ways of doing so is to collaborate with local businesses and then do giveaways. So for example, let’s say you call it a giveaway, Tuesdays, whatever.

D.J. Paris 10:23
I love this, by the way, this idea alone has never ever been brought up by anyone I’ve ever interviewed. So I’m really excited about this.

Gogo Bethke 10:31
Okay, so let’s do this. So you can do like giveaway Tuesday. So just tried to say with any, just like everything else, if you cold call her and you consistent with and you cold call every day from eight to noon, then when you decide to do a giveaway, you’re going to be consistent with it. And you’re going to call it giveaway Tuesdays and you’re going to do it every single Tuesday. So then every week, you go and pick a business that’s local to you that you go in and you say, Hey, I’m gonna go, I’m a local realtor, I built my business on social media, I’m trying to build yours and mine at the same time try to generate local sales for myself. And with that local sales for you, is there anything in your business that you can give away, then it’s not costing you a trillion dollars, but it will generate traffic to you. And with that giveaway will generate traffic to me?

D.J. Paris 11:12
Why that’s brilliant it because you know, these local businesses, here’s what they’re always getting these phone calls, if you have a small, if you have a local business, you’re getting phone calls from billboard, advertisers, newspapers, radio, which all of which want your money. And now you’re offering them as a realtor, hey, for you know, if you can, apart with some something, I can promote your business for you.

Gogo Bethke 11:34
Yes. And then also you get their followers. So the way you do that is that you may take a picture of the item that you’re giving away, I do recommend though, instead of being just the item, you should be in the photo, maybe even the owner of the other business, the local business, you guys should be in the photo holding the thing that you’re going to give away, then you’re going to say, then you’re going to name the terms of the giveaway, you always want whoever is participating in the giveaway to follow both of your businesses, you’re doing this for the traffic, you don’t just want to give them something, you give them something for the future eyeballs, because as long as you can stay in some of them, that’s your free advertising for the future. And they always be reminded that you’re a realtor, and they always going to see your posts. And if and when down the road. They need a realtor, they wouldn’t be able to think of anybody else but you because they see you all the time. Plus, you already gave them something. And people feel like I got something from you. I have to I owe you now. Right. So the law of reciprocity. Yeah. So they’re going to choose you over another realtor because they already feel like you gave them something already. So with the giveaways, there’s a few terms that you always want to make sure that you plug into that giveaway. So first of all being the photos. Second of all, when you say these are the terms of and you’re going to put the date on which it ends. So you’re gonna say if you’re doing it every Tuesday, then you might say, Okay, you make your posts on Tuesdays, and then they have to follow to the terms and then you will pick the winner on Sundays. And then you do another one on Tuesday, pick the winner on Sunday and another one on Tuesday, pick the winner on Sunday. So you say they must follow you and the other business. So that right there grows your audience. And yeah, then they can. The other thing is they can tag three friends to entering this giveaway tag three local friends. So now you just not only gain their following, but you get gain three of their friends following, right. And then when you choose the winner, you’re gonna go through their profile, and there’s two buttons, there’s one following and followers, you’re going to make sure that they’re actually following you, then you’re going to look up the other business, make sure they’re following them. And then you’re going to go to the notes, make sure they tag three friends they did they qualify, that’s the winner.

D.J. Paris 13:35
Love it, for what type what type of businesses you think are good prospects for realtors out there thinking to implement this.

Gogo Bethke 13:43
I mean, really anyone from a dog walker, to a restaurant to a yoga studio to a doctor’s office. I mean, as long as it’s local, because you’re going for that local market. Now I usually do giveaways like I just gave a book away. And I was talking about on Sunday how you know, I love reading and when I was younger, I actually paid other kids to read a book and tell me what it was about because I I hated studying. I was so clever of cheating my way through college and all that, you know, you get older, you learn that I cheated myself. Now the professors. Sure now I was talking about reading the book. And I pretty much said I named the terms of the thing. And I said, everybody who follows me name three friends, whoever is going to be the winner yet to pick and I have my Amazon store. So I told the winner just go to my Amazon store, pick a book that you haven’t read yet. I’ll personally mail it to you. So if you’re doing something like that, that’s more of a nationwide audience. But I wasn’t going for that Local Lead Generation purpose. So just depending on what your purpose is, with that when you go nationwide, yeah, you can get referrals. That’s not out of the window. Like that’s a 25% of a commission. Sure. You do it nationwide as well. But I’m just saying stay true to your what you’re trying to achieve.

D.J. Paris 14:57
Right. So you want to just immerse yourself in your community and this is another way of number one helping a small business, and also working together to cross promote each other.

Gogo Bethke 15:06
Yeah, and also video works best. So if you feel really good about this, then you can take this one step further and create a quick one minute video, if you’re going to put it in your feed, or if you’re willing to take it longer and do an IG TV style video, which is a vertical style video, you’re going to shoot a video, let’s say with the owner of the business as constructions. When did you open this business? What are you guys famous for? Is there a dish that is just so good, and you may you know, you got the whatever five stores local restaurant or like anything about them that it gives them knowledge about the local business, and also in the same time makes you that local expert, and that local brand where everybody knows now. And so then you do don’t give away via video.

D.J. Paris 15:46
And I want everyone listening to realize that nobody starts out with hundreds of 1000s of followers, we all start out with essentially, our friends who follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. But it all takes time I interviewed these guys, I was talking to go go about yesterday who are YouTube guys, and they go, but they make videos about Portland. They’re hyper local to Portland. And they said, you know, for six months, we just never looked at our view count because we knew it was going to be like two views a day. So don’t worry if that’s where you’re at. If you have few friends, if you’ve always go to Go Go’s bootcamp, we’ll teach you how to obviously increase that over time. But this is a marathon guys,

Gogo Bethke 16:26
just those two, the way I look at it in real estate, everybody needs a roof above their head. Yes, if you saw it, and one of them buys a house, we’re talking 1000s of dollars in commissions

D.J. Paris 16:37
huge. Yeah, and guys, and even if you only get one entry, right, that’s still one person who cared enough to get excited about your promotion and now is tagged three additional people, so don’t worry.

Gogo Bethke 16:50
So when they want and you you pick the winner, and they receive the final item you personally may have delivered it or you may, however you got it to, you always ask them to take a photo with that item and tag you or send it to you. It’s even better when they tag you. So they take the item posted on their wall, when they tag you, the system notifies you and then you can share it. So now it shows to the rest of the world that may have questions. I’m like, Oh, are you really gonna give them away is someone who’s gonna win when they see that they did win. And they tagged you now when they tagged you, you got all of their friends eyeballs. And then when they tagged you, then you generated their friends over to your so it’s like a cross promotion? I guess because it made you locally jet that whatever you said you will do you follow through and you actually did it.

D.J. Paris 17:35
Yeah. And we I want to talk to because I live in a big metropolitan city. I’m in Chicago, you are in the exact opposite of of where we are. Because a lot of it look, it would if our roles were reversed. And you were in Chicago and you had 1000s and 1000s of followers. Somebody who’s listening might say, well, of course she’s in Chicago, everybody you know she has this huge market, but you are not in Chicago, you are in a very small town.

Gogo Bethke 18:01
You can find it on the map. It’s very small. Yeah. So it’s called Pinckney, Michigan, very tiny little community. I mean, I moved from a high rise in the city in Europe. So when I moved here, and everybody has an acre and we live off of a dirt road, and the closest neighbor is like, hi, your name. It’s like I was so weirded out, there was one grocery store one gas station. It was just not what I was used to now after being a mom of two and the boys being able to just run around outside and shoot their BB guns in the backyard. I learned to love it. But yeah, it’s not that metropolitan area. We don’t have 1000s and 1000s. You know, the real estate opportunities, I guess.

D.J. Paris 18:43
Yeah. So I guess the point I’m making listeners is don’t worry about what your follower count is today, where you live, what you perceive as maybe I’m in a more rural area go Go is in the most rural area, and she has built up this huge following. And you she wants to teach you of course how to do that as well. But yeah, what a great idea. So go to local businesses say I would love to promote you. Also, you know, let them know like, hey, this helps my business too. But more importantly, I really want to help you guys, this real estate’s a hyperlocal business and we should support each other.

Gogo Bethke 19:15
And then another tip, if you like postcards, which I used to do them, but I think they work just like clockwork, this is not a social media tip. But this is a good tip. You can take you can go to the local restaurant, ask them if they can give you a coupon for something. So they may say a free appetizer with an order of entry, or they may say to drinks with an order of an entry or whatever they can give you restaurant can always give you something. Now you’re going to go into your database, you’re going to get all of your mailing addresses you’re going to design it design is beautiful postcard that you are on the front and you talk about your business and the back you print the coupon. Yes, so they have a reason to hold on to because otherwise your postcard just go straight into the trash.

D.J. Paris 19:53
And I haven’t even a thing to tack on to that. So this is a great idea. So let’s let’s recap what gogo just said. So in addition to doing these giveaways, right, when you’re talking to the owner, say, Hey, by the way, I’m thinking about doing a postcard mailer, you know, to help to try to drum up business for me, and I thought maybe we could do it together, ask them if they’re willing to give you a, you know, some sort of discount coupon that you could promote via mailers, postcards. And then if you’re like, Well, I don’t have the money to do that, right? Obviously, maybe the, the restaurant or salon might be willing to co sponsor that. But let’s say they’re not and you don’t have enough money. This is where partnerships come in. So if you have a lender, if you have an attorney, a title company, these are all ancillary partners to your business, which you probably have and say, hey, I want to co sponsor this, can you guys help cover the cost? Right? A lot of these institutions, lenders, attorneys, etc, will do this for you and cover the bill.

Gogo Bethke 20:48
Yeah, I know in Michigan, and I’m not sure if every state is different. There are regulations of the size of every if you are searching size in the lender has to be searched in size in order to split it halfway. But yes, that’s saving you cost.

D.J. Paris 21:02
Yeah, it’s huge. So yeah, guys, that’s what’s known as make sure it’s No, there’s not a RESPA violation. But the the like if you’re working with a lender, in there a reputable lender, they’ll make sure but yeah, definitely just a way to co sponsor and keep your costs down. But well, what an awesome idea. So you just gave two really strong ideas about how to work hyperlocal with businesses?

Gogo Bethke 21:21
Oh, good, good. Well, that’s the goal. The goal is for all of us to make money, you know, I mean, and helping one another making when you’re supporting a local business, and they’re supporting you, everybody wins, we all feed our children.

D.J. Paris 21:32
Exactly. So what else is going on in social media for 20?

Gogo Bethke 21:37
Engagement. So as we talked about the 2%, that Facebook is going to allow them to see your post engagement is very important how many followers you have in the new algorithm, it doesn’t matter, you can just use that you can have two followers. But if those two give you the time of the day, and they watch every video that you posted, and yada yada, that’s what Facebook and Instagram cares about. They care about how much of their attention are you able to capture? How many people take the time to comment? How many people take the time to like how many of them they will DM you 101 will skip the video when you post it, how many remember, watch it all the way through. So what you want what it’s called now, engagement, you don’t want necessarily just the likes and stuff you want them to engage to give you the time of the day. In order to do that. You want to share fun stuff, you want to ask them questions, because when you ask them questions, they have to do what respond. When you find that’s considered engagement. Yes, when you do these giveaways and things like that, and they have to comment and tag people. That’s that’s all engagement. And that’s the reason why you’re doing it is so you to mass natural to mass organically with the algorithm, so you don’t have to pay for ads to get likes and followers.

D.J. Paris 22:45
Yeah, so So guys, this is really, really important. So think about it from the social medias company’s perspective, what they really are trying to serve up to the people who visit their sites, is to make sure they’re giving the best possible content the way they judge. Now they can’t watch every video, they can’t read every post, obviously, they don’t do that. Well, all they can go on is how engaged the audience is with that content. So what that means is, you know, like if gogo said getting people to share it, getting people to comment, getting people to tag their friends in it that shows the social media providers that wow, this is a high quality post look at how much engagement there is. Google curious about this? Because I’ve heard about this in the past. And I don’t know how effective these are. It’s a little bit of a gray area. So I want to get your opinion on it. I don’t have an opinion myself. What about creating groups that are engagement groups? So you’re commenting? I

Gogo Bethke 23:43
would say that because you see that next thing I was about to talk? Oh my

D.J. Paris 23:47
gosh, that’s so that by the way, guys, we did not set that up at all. That is so she’s literally pointing at the word engagement groups.

Gogo Bethke 23:53
And we are on two groups.

D.J. Paris 23:56
i Great minds think alike, I guess. Actually.

Gogo Bethke 24:00
That’s the exact order. I wrote them down. I mean, that’s funny.

D.J. Paris 24:03
So let’s, let’s it’s funny, because I first heard about this about 10 years ago with Facebook. And because I had a blog, I had a very successful blog outside of real estate as a humor blog. And we used to do this, but I kind of forgot about it until just now. So let’s talk about it.

Gogo Bethke 24:17
Yeah, so Instagram does limit you though, to how many people you can have in the group. I think it’s 35 or 25, or something like that. So if you have more people like that, like in my team now what we call team Gaga, there’s 130 of us. So we have multiple groups. So we call it tingle the one to go to Tim go go three thing to go for as people joining your groups, you just add them on and then you create a new one and you automatically add a new one. So then you have multiple groups. So what I do, and we are recording this, so I don’t know if you ever going to post it or not. But I can show you when you go to your posts. So open up your last post on Instagram, and then you’re going to see that little triangle right there. You see that whatever that’s called, like a paper, arrow or whatever it is. Yeah, you’ll click that and it’s going to ask you where do You want to send it and you see my team? So it says yes. So you just send it into the group very quickly, just so it’s more like a reminder for them for like, oh, Google posted something. So then that everybody from that group can come over, take the time to like and comment. But the point of the group is you have to play fair. You can everyone, everyone can expect them to comment 10 posts on yours, but then you’re not going to return the favor, because you’re gonna get.

D.J. Paris 25:25
So guys, right, let’s go, let’s, let’s dial this really get specific here. So here’s what you’re going to do. If you’re a realtor, you’re going to reach out to other realtors who are active on Instagram, you’re gonna say, hey, we know that engagement is everything and Instagram cares how many likes, but an additional likes, they want to see comments, they want to see tags, they want, you know, shares, why don’t we support each other? And each time we both posts, we’re going to share comment and like and you can get a whole network of people to do this.

Gogo Bethke 25:57
Yes. So you do it to mess with the algorithm? Pretty much.

D.J. Paris 26:01
Yeah, this is this is a way this is a way to to show Instagram or Facebook or whatever, that people are engaged with your content. And it guys, it is perfectly okay to do this. This is a great, great idea. Yeah.

Gogo Bethke 26:14
Okay. Next one, tag location, always. So our business is a local business. Yes, in order to generate eyeballs from that location from people that may not know of your existence, you always have to tag the location. So in your post, when you make a post, you look above the post that shows your location. That’s because you tag the location just before posting it is allows you to do a couple of things. So you plug in the photo, then you can write the blah, blah, blah, then you can tag a person or you can tag your location, those and you can then share it to Facebook, those steps are all built in to your Instagram posts, you want to make sure to do all of them. And always, always, always take location. What that does, though, puts your post on a map. So if I go, let’s say you’re in Chicago, if I’m in Chicago, and I’m bored, I don’t know what to do in Chicago. Today, I’m going to go on Instagram, put in location, put it in Chicago as a location and see what’s going on everybody that tag Chicago, I see who’s who’s eating, where if there’s an event going on things like that. That’s the reason why you tag your location, because you want those people from that location to get eyeballs on your post, even who might not be you know, they could care less about your open house this weekend, or the newest listing or whatever you take the location for. But by clicking that they get to see your storefront what I call your actual profile advertising to them, they’re going to follow and that’s all you want. You just want them to follow. So if and when they’re ready down on the road, they’ll call you.

D.J. Paris 27:42
Quick question. This is cool. I’m curious if you ever thought about this? And the answer might be it doesn’t matter. So you’re talking about sharing posts from Instagram, and GoGold mentioned Hey, you want to share it to Facebook because obviously Instagram is owned by Facebook. And it’s an instant, you just basically click a button and it’s going to share it. Question question if you think it matters, if you instead of sharing it from Instagram, if you organically post it as well, not as well. But instead, it’s instead of slow. So when you’re out you’re going to be posting it to places Instagram, same exact post you’re gonna post in Facebook, do you think it matters? Whether you share it from Instagram? Or take the extra step not share it from Instagram and just art and post it uniquely also in Facebook?

Gogo Bethke 28:27
Yeah, I don’t think so. I think it used to matter in the past before you buy one another where it showed like it was an Instagram post. And now it’s fair to Facebook, it doesn’t show it any more. Now it just looks like a Facebook post. Even

D.J. Paris 28:39
I feel the same way. I just was curious because you’re the You’re the queen of Instagram. So

Gogo Bethke 28:43
from Instagram, so my account so I strongly recommend everybody to have a business page on bonus, I don’t do business on personal for many reasons a because my friends who didn’t sign up for that,

D.J. Paris 28:54
right, they don’t want to see your your social media bootcamp stuff.

Gogo Bethke 28:58
And then be it’s because you’re limited on your personal you’re limited to 5000. So believe it or not 5000 may sound like I don’t know, 5000 people. But if you do this right, in less than a year, you’re going to be past that. And then you’re going to have to boot people. And so do it on a page. Now, you’re going to have to start over and do it on a page because you’re going to outgrow that platform so might as well just start and do it right and do it on a page on both sides.

D.J. Paris 29:24
Got it. I will say as far as the sharing there is also a Share button to Twitter and I know Twitter isn’t as popular of course as it used to be if you are going to share to Twitter do not share to Twitter via the Instagram app because it just posts a link and Twitter does not love that so as as Go Go saying hey, you can click the share to Facebook and it shouldn’t negatively affect the Facebook rankings but if you’re going to do Twitter, yeah copy and paste it over. And also, you know put the photo in organically. Twitter does not love driving traffic to Instagram so if you do it from Instagram, it just posts a link to your to your your Instagram posts, guys, so if you’re using Twitter, which probably most Realtors aren’t these days, but if you are just organically posted in Twitter,

Gogo Bethke 30:07
yeah, Twitter is a it’s a totally different level of English. I never been able to understand I’m happy I can speak basic English. I don’t Twitter English, so I never did it.

D.J. Paris 30:18
Yeah, yeah, it’s well, and Twitter is struggled over the last 10 years to really gain its foothold. But yeah, so guys, so let’s just recap a couple of those ideas. We talked about working with local businesses, right. We talked about doing giveaways, we talked about doing mailers, then we talked about Facebook or Instagram. And we talked about tagging your location, we talked about having a you know, the the giveaways and making sure people are engaging, right. It’s all about engagement. And then we also talked about sharing, you know, how do we how do we share our posts, to other social media networks and having an engagement group, don’t hesitate, reach out to other realtors in your area. If you don’t know who is heavy in social media in your area. Just ask around or look online or google it right you’ll have or look on Instagram do searches, you will find there are many, many realtors who love Instagram, and guess what they all want engagement. So reach out to them and say, Hey, let’s create a little engagement group and support each other.

Gogo Bethke 31:16
Yeah, and it’s easy to find on Instagram, especially if they’re using the right hashtags. So for example, I’m in Michigan. So if I’m looking for Michigan realtors that have social media presence, I would search for the hashtag Michigan realtor. Right? Every single one of them that’s on there. So if you’re in Chicago, you’re gonna do Chicago realtor, Cleveland, realtor, Ohio realtor, whatever area that you cover, you can just put that in and search for those and they will pop up and then just message them.

D.J. Paris 31:41
Great. What else is on your sheet? I don’t want to guess anymore. Because probably, I already guessed perfectly once and I’ll probably not.

Gogo Bethke 31:53
So personalized brand is no longer optional. Okay, so what that means to me and in my language, let me break it down to you, you don’t sell real estate, you sell yourself and you’re selling your services. So if you are not in the posts, if you are not in the pictures, if you’re not in the videos, you are going to lose them, you might not even gain them in the first place. But if you gain them at some point, you’re going to lose them. So if all you post is your last listing and open house this weekend and a nice kitchen, people are an average on the market for every seven, how do they say every seven to 10 years for six months, if we do is realistically in between, you’re going to lose them. People are curious about how other people live their life or do their business. And that’s how you’re going to gain their eyeballs. So personalize it as much as you can. It has to be about you. So if nothing goes to change this year, but you’re going to put yourself more often in front of the camera, you’re going to skyrocket your business.

D.J. Paris 32:52
Yeah, this is important. So guys, here’s a really silly example, but a good one. So let’s say you’re going to take a picture of the food at a restaurant that you’re at, which of course we all love to do, right, everybody does that. I would encourage you and look, it’s really cool if you can get that shot just right. But how about putting yourself behind the food as well so people can see that you’re at the restaurant with your husband or your boyfriend or your girlfriend or whoever just alone. Like people want to see you in addition to the perfect meal that you’re about to eat, put yourself in and in fact just test it to Tupac do two different things on two different days show just the picture of the food you’ll get a ton of likes, show yourself in the in the in the picture for a different restaurant with a different food and see what the difference is. I will almost guarantee you’ll get more likes when you’re in the pit.

Gogo Bethke 33:39
We’ll take it one step further and create a quick little video story about you taking that first bite of that food. That’s the reason why went to that restaurant. And then you let people watch your facial reactions while you swallow that first bite and it’s so good. And next thing you know you have 1000s of views and now they’re at their restaurant open ordering the same food tagging you oh my gosh, I can’t believe I didn’t know about this place.

D.J. Paris 34:05
I just did this with my family. We they were in town. And my we were some restaurant in Chicago down downtown and they had whatever you order walk guacamole. It’s a Mexican place. They give you a bowl of crickets of dried fried crickets. That’s one of their specialties and it’s kind of a novelty, but it’s a nice restaurant. And so I’m like, Oh, I have to eat this right. And of course we have to video in the eating a cricket because that’s kind of funny. And you know, I got a few 1000 views just from doing instead of doing a picture of a cricket. Look. I’m about to eat a cricket. Nobody cares. They want to see me eat a cricket. Yeah, right. And I was just doing it for fun and

Gogo Bethke 34:46
that cricket going on. Yeah.

D.J. Paris 34:48
So that’s a really good you guys. It doesn’t have to be an extreme thing like that. But it’s silly as it’s I did this I ate live octopus in New York like five years ago. And I did the same thing. I’m like we got a video this week. Yeah, yeah, it was well live in that. Yeah, yeah, they were all squiggling around on a plate. Now that one actually got some people didn’t like it because they were like, That’s animal cruelty. They didn’t understand that the tentacle is already severed. And it was just the nerves were moving around. So it wasn’t like, I pulled it off of a live octopus, but it had been pulled off of a live octopus and then they anyway it’s a bit of a delicacy.

Gogo Bethke 35:24
Anything so if you want to take ever any one on one of those shows, where you win things, if you eat things, you want to eat anything, but are made to live octopus.

D.J. Paris 35:35
All right. Anything else we got for today?

Gogo Bethke 35:39
Yes, video video is a must. Cute little stories, just not stories that you plan for like stories, what I mean, like, literally, you have this gadget with you all the time, your cell phone, grab that thing, go to your stories on Instagram and just blah, blah, blah for 15 seconds, whatever’s on your mind whatever’s going on in your day, show that you walk into your your closing and what is your closing gap show that, you know, you’re one to Starbucks, and you order this coffee, because you’re meeting with this client, like whatever that’s going on, just show snippets, people are curious how you live your life, people are curious how you run your business, people are curious of your work ethic. And there’s no better way of showing it but showing it in action. So video is very important. And try to make sure that you know at least 80% of the time you are in that video. And you’re not just shooting random happenings in your life and around you but you’re actually in it and you’re the subject of the video. LinkedIn is the next very important thing LinkedIn is now competing with the Facebook’s and Instagrams, and so allow, they are allowing way more eyeballs right now than Facebook and Instagram does, because they want you to use their platform to get that, that attention. So use LinkedIn, the way I do my post is I start everything on Instagram, I automatically feed it to Facebook. And then I take the same link and go over to Instagram and post it. So technically, I post twice, I don’t type of the blah, blah, blah, before I post the blah, blah, blah and Instagram, I copy it. So then I go to LinkedIn plug in the photo, paste, the blah, blah, blah post literally takes 20 seconds to post on all three platforms. So that the ad costs. So Facebook, what happened is when they opened it up where we can run ads, they ran out of geological locations. So multiple people were able to cover with their ads, the same location. Now there’s, it’s oversaturated. And in order to fix that, the only way to fix that is by raising the cost. So they’re going to raise the price and assume that the ones that can afford it anymore, it’s just going to fall off. Facebook ad cost is going to get much higher, my understanding is in 2020 Don’t quote me on it. So if you were planning on running some ads, you want to do it now and you want to do it fast. So you can hopefully stay in the game. Very smart, a lot of fun, then new ones come in. I don’t know if you guys realize but on the Facebook app, again, if you have sorry, not just the app, but Facebook altogether. If you have a page, now you have an option to share your calendar. Yes, people can literally plug themselves into a vise like if you go to my Facebook and Google’s real estate. You can see how it’s set up. I have a buy side consultation and the listing site consultation and in syncs with my personal calendar. So it only gives them the opportunity of the times when I have set up when it’s open for a half an hour interval and they literally plug themselves in to a consultation. I just wake up I’m like, Oh, I have a buyer consultation and 11 today. Yep,

D.J. Paris 38:28
I use the same thing for realtors that are interested in joining our firms. So if you go to the page for our my company, yeah, it there’s a book appointment thing. And yes, you guys it takes like two minutes to set this thing up. And yeah, very smart.

Gogo Bethke 38:42
Next one is template based marketing. If you are using a third party, or it’s template based where they they are using beautiful stock photos, they’re beautiful, but they’re stuck. It’s not personal. There is no correlation, there is no real relationship between me and photo on the other end, so that those things don’t work. So if you are paying for a service like that, stop it right now. Even if you’re not willing to do real estate, you’re wasting your money with that it’s not going to work, it’s not going to generate your business. And you probably know it already, because you probably followed for a while and not seeing the results. And that’s why it’s because it’s not personalized. So the template based got to go create your hashtag so you remember we were talking about the Michigan Realtor will find someone hashtags are an Instagram are kind of like search words. So if you would go to Google and search for something, how would you search so imagine those words plugged into one little more but the hashtag in front of it. So you create your own hashtag. The reason why that’s important is because that is your brand. If somebody is looking for Google’s real estate, they’re going to plug in Google’s real estate and they’re going to find me because I tagged myself every single time with my own hashtag. Very smart. So you want to a figure out what is your brand being create your own hashtag and creating your own hashtag that just means guys, that when you make a post you’re going to have stick that brand. So if yours is keeping it real podcast, then you’re going to make a post. And every time you make a post, you’re going to do hashtag keeping a real podcast every single time. So when I go on there, and I’m gonna be like, What is this keepin it real podcast about I’m gonna go on there putting keeping the real past, and then I’m going to find every post they ever made. So the more there is, the more legit it’s going to look. And also when other people start using your hashtags, that really makes you more legit. So when your listeners, you could do a giveaway. And you’re saying, Hey, guys, everybody who tags keeping a real podcast this week, in your posts, and the end of the week, I give away blah, blah, blah. Now you had 100,000 of your followers tagging you once that’s 100,000 tags. Huge. That’s just made you really legit,

D.J. Paris 40:48
right? Yep. Awesome. Great idea.

Gogo Bethke 40:51
So hashtags are important. voice notes. So if somebody reaches out to you don’t just send back a normal message of like, yeah, that sounds great. Hold that little voice note button and say yes, as Jessica and call them by the first name. So go to their profile, look at their first thing. Call them by their first name, because everybody loves hearing their own name out of your mouth. Because that means you recognize me, you see me, you hear me? I exist. Yeah, my

D.J. Paris 41:17
girlfriend does that for me on text message, which is she’s the first person that’s ever done that and I love it. I love hearing your voice. So instead of calling me sometimes we’ll be texting back and forth. She’ll just hold that button and do it. You guys can do the same thing on Facebook. So just voice

Gogo Bethke 41:31
my voice notes. So when somebody reaches out to you and said, Hey, I would love to you know, buy a two bedroom condo in Howell Michigan. Now just sending back a message saying, oh, yeah, I would love to be a realtor, you can be like, Hi, Kevin, thank you so much for reaching out, you know, I have this and this going on today. But would you please just type up exactly what you’re looking for. I need your full name, your email address and your cell phone number. I will, you know, log you into the system, I will email you everything that’s on the market by the end of the day. And once again, thank you so much for reaching out to me. So it’s something that is just way more personal. You call them by the name, you give them the time of the day, and more than likely they’re going to do business with you because it’s more personal.

D.J. Paris 42:07
Awesome. Let’s stop there only because you have so much stuff that you I know you want to get to. And I don’t want to get all of it away this month, because I want people coming back next month they will anyway, but I am putting the brakes on it because I want people to start utilizing what they’ve learned today. And then we’re gonna follow up in a month and continue on. So yeah, this was so amazing, guys. So what we don’t want to do is overwhelm you with too much ideas. And gogo is ready to just keep going for the next hour because she’s so amazing. But here’s what you guys need to do right now. Go to gogos bootcamp.com. Guys, I don’t promote anything. This is the only thing I promote. It’s that good. I mean, listen to gogo, she is ready to talk for another hour about this. Her course is incredible. I am doing her course, we this is embarrassing. We don’t even have an Instagram account for our podcast because I could never figure out how to promote a podcast on Instagram. And I finally realized, because I’m kind of a dummy. I finally realized by going through our program, how to do that. So we’re going to start doing this. So join this journey with me together, right? Obviously I want to grow with podcasts. You guys want to grow your businesses and real estate gogo is the person to do it. She’s done it for 1000s of people continues to do it. And how nice is it that she comes on our show out of the goodness of her heart to talk to you and give you guys all these great tips for free? Like how amazing is that? So guys, Go Go’s boot camp.com. It’s a brand new program, even from just a few months ago, and it’s awesome. And she is a speaker. She goes all over the country talking about this she gets paid a ton of money to teach what she’s giving you right now, but she wants to teach you in the privacy of your home. So definitely Go Go’s bootcamp.com is where you need to go and follow her on Instagram as well. Which is Go Go’s real estate at gogos real estate.

Gogo Bethke 43:56
Thank you guys so much. I love this opportunity. I truly love what I get to do like this is like my hat. You know, I mean, it’s fun. It’s so fun.

D.J. Paris 44:04
And you know, look guys, we’re gonna have her on every single month. So here’s what we need from you the listeners, we need you to do two things. Actually three things you need to go to Instagram and follow Go Go Go Go’s real estate you need to go to, you need to go also to Facebook and followers. Well, you also need to follow us on Facebook guys every single day we post a link to an article that we have found online to help you grow your business. So at keeping it real pod and soon we’ll have an Instagram account too. So you guys need to follow go go on Instagram, Facebook, follow us on Instagram, and you’re gonna go out and tell a friend as well about this podcast. All you have to do is turn to the realtor next to you in your office and say, Hey, do you guys do you want to learn how to grow your business on social media? We’ve got I just listen to this podcast to this amazing woman. It just gave like 10 really great ideas. You’re gonna tell them about our podcast and then and really that’s all you got to do if every one of our listeners tells a friend we’re going to double our listenership, which we did last year, we want to do it again. So I want to thank you Guys on advance for helping build, build up your business by listening to these podcasts and also help your neighbors business. Tell the person next to you in the you know, while nobody Realtors don’t work in offices anymore, but everybody you know, tell them about this podcast right? And make sure that they know about gogo and you know, we just want to keep our whole intention guys is legitimately to help you grow your business. That is what we do. And how cool is it that we do it for free on these podcasts? So,

Gogo Bethke 45:28
so let’s let’s ask their opinion what they want to know. So yeah, that’s leave us messages. DMS is leave a note on any of our posts just say hey, I just listened to your keepin it real podcast. And I would really love if you covered this

D.J. Paris 45:42
guy’s this, this is for you. So we need to know what you want to hear. So reach out to us you can go to by the way, every single episode we’ve ever done, including the Google episodes are all on keeping it real pod.com. We’re also on Apple, iTunes, Google Play Stitcher, Pandora, all the places you can find podcasts, just pull up in a podcast app, look for keeping it real podcast, I promise it’ll pop up if not reach out to me at our website, and I’ll help you. But guys, we want to help you grow your business in 2020. Gogo, thank you so much for being on the show. Once again, we’re going to have you back in a month, assuming you’re willing to write and we we love it Go Go’s boot camp.com. Guys gogo is one of my favorite people ever for this show. She’s just perfect and the audience loves her. So on behalf of our listeners, go go. Thank you. And on behalf of gogo and me to the listeners. Thank you for listening.

Gogo Bethke 46:32
Thanks so much for having me on if you will take the time. When you do see the results of anything that I shared here today if you would just send me a message I want to make I just added it makes me fluffy and makes me feel good knowing that whatever I put out there and generates the results and everybody’s happy with it. So I would love to get your notes when you see the results.

D.J. Paris 46:51
Perfect guys get stay in touch. And thank you so much. And we’ll see you next month Gaga.

Gogo Bethke 46:57
Thank you so much. Okay, bye

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Gogo Bethke arrived in the U.S. with only $6, no sphere of influence, and English being her third language. She proceeded to get her real estate license and start marketing on Facebook. Within a few years she sold 45mm in real estate and today commands a team of 110 agents. In this episode the social media queen talks about how most get brokers get social media wrong and provides best practices that you can implement today to find more clients online. We’re HUGE fans of Gogo and you will be, too!

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by Quicken Loans real estate professionals. When you work with Quicken Loans, you have an agent relationship manager available to you and your team. These dedicated experts are part of the agent relations team. They serve as your single point of coordination so you can count on them to keep you in the loop throughout your client’s entire home buying process, call 888-980-2891 or go to real estate dot Quicken loans.com Today, call for cost information and conditions equal housing lender licensed in all 50 states NMLS consumer access.org Number 3030 And now onto the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest real estate podcast made for real estate agents by real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host for the show and coming up in just a moment. We have gogo from gogos boot camp. She is a social media superstar in particular on Instagram. So for so many realtors out there wondering how do I get my social media to actually work for me? How do I find clients? Gogo is going to show you how to do that here in just a moment. So in addition, I want every single listener to think of another realtor that you know that could benefit from hearing this sort of interview right where not only do we interview top one percenters, we also interview social media experts gogo is both a top 1% producer and social media expert. We’ve got over 117 of these episodes. So I want everyone to think of someone that could benefit that really wants to learn from top producers how to go about building their business and send them a link to this podcast, you can simply send them a text with the URL, keeping it real pod.com. That is right for our website, podcast. Every episode, you can stream directly from there. You also please everyone follow us on Facebook, we are located@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pot every single day, we find an article online about helping you grow your business and we post it there and we also do a weekly video. So follow us on Facebook. And lastly, thank you for continuing to listen, we really appreciate it. We’re going strong. Now if you are by the way, if you’re a sponsor or somebody who would like to be a sponsor of our show, let us know we’ll definitely can tell you more about how that works. But guys, thanks again for listening. Thanks for telling a friend. Thanks for following us on social media and onto our interview with Gogo.

Today on the show we have gogo Beth key from GoPro boot camp.com Gogo came to the US in 2003. To build her American dream she was broke, she had no sphere of influence, no experience barely spoke English and only $6 to her name. So that left her with nothing else but Facebook to grow her business. And that’s where she started. She created gogos real estate and her real estate career began with the power of social media gogo has sold over 45 million in residential real estate transactions. She shares the good the bad, and the ugly side of real estate and her honest snippets into her everyday life to her 10s of 1000s of followers. And in the real estate community she earned the nickname the social media queen. After being asked to present at various realtor events. She built a social media bootcamp which is called a Go Go’s boot camp.com. This is for realtors, and today she has a team of 109 agents growing nationwide and her goal is to help as many agents and brokers as possible to forge and create a name for themselves in real estate and if she can do it, she’s this girl from Transylvania, with from Romania with no US education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience and an accent than anyone can do this. Please follow gogo on Instagram at gogos real estate gogo Welcome to the show.

Gogo Bethke 4:20
Oh my gosh, I think this was the best description of me ever.

D.J. Paris 4:24
Well, I’m pretty good at it. So no, no, this, I am so excited. I have to before we get started, I just want to tell the audience, this is a really big deal for me. And so gogo is so sweet. And she’s too busy to even do these kinds of things. And the fact that she’s taking time is we’re so honored. We get requests every single day, really, like legitimately every day from people that say I want to be on the show. And you know, most of the time 99% of the time we say hey, thanks. But a lot of times, you know we’re not sure about what kind of value they can bring. So we turn people down. And gogo is one of the first people she actually made me a Video, which is so cool. And nobody had ever done that. And sometimes just going the extra step, because normally, we probably would have passed, not anything personal to gogo, but just, we weren’t sure it would fit our model. And she sent me a video and he she goes, here’s what I can do for your listeners. And it was exactly the perfect way to, you know, get our attention. And this is exactly what she does and how she has grown her own real estate business. So I just want to honor you for that. Because I will tell you out of the hundreds of other people that we’ve turned away, nobody has ever made me a video and said, Here’s the value I can bring to you. So thank you for doing that.

Gogo Bethke 5:38
Well, that was a really good idea. Just as you said, it’s always better to send a quick video because that way your clients, your potential future client can see a face with the name versus just being a realtor out there that just left him a voicemail. So I try when I have a minute to send the quick, you always want to keep it less than 30 seconds. If possible, just do it, I want you to have a face with the name this is gonna go, I would love to be a real turnoff to have the opportunity call me back, this is myself. And

D.J. Paris 6:03
I love it. And I bet you less than 1% of all realtors do that. So what a great way to separate yourself, especially to if it’s a purchase to lead if it’s through Zillow, or op city or, or any of the different lead providers realtor.com If especially if it’s a purchase lead, because they definitely don’t know you.

Gogo Bethke 6:22
Exactly. And you’re just one of those emails that ends up in their spam you out of the 100 other ones that are going to send them an email at the same time. Not only that, but if you think about it, text message gets open 99% of the time, email gets opened less than 2% of the time. So there is your rate right there. Which one’s going to have a higher rate of return.

D.J. Paris 6:41
Yeah, and by the way, you can also send a link to the video in via text as well.

Gogo Bethke 6:46
Yeah, I usually just shoot the video, if you keep it less than 30 seconds, you can text it directly to them. That’s a very good point, too. Yeah. So you don’t have to upload it to YouTube or whatever, you just send them directly the link.

D.J. Paris 6:57
So I want to go all the way back to 2003. When you came to United States, I love to hear how you got to where you are today. If you don’t mind starting us at the beginning. Can

Gogo Bethke 7:07
I step back a little bit further. So you understand why I’m in the United States. So back into the up until 1989. It was communism in Romania, which means if we’re cut off from the Western world, so finally when when communism ended, and we got access to the Western world, I remember my dad coming home with a colored television and a VCR player. And he brought two VCRs home it was the 48 hours by Eddie Murphy.

Unknown Speaker 7:31
Everyone, everybody thinks like it’s

Gogo Bethke 7:33
coming to America. It’s not that movie that made me come to America. It’s actually Eddie Murphy is 48 hours. I just thought he was the funniest human being I’ve ever seen. He was the first person that I knew that black people existed because when you are in the Western world, or Eastern world, I should say and cut off from the Western world. All we knew is white, like there’s no there’s no diversity. There’s zero diversity. As diverse it gets as we have gypsies, it’s pretty much as diverse it’s going to get in Eastern Europe. And so opening my eyes to I’m like, hold on a minute, like there’s a whole other kind of human being out there. And to me, he was so funny. I that was my first recollection being eight years old. I’ve thinking that I’m going wherever that man is that coming to find out it’s America. So that’s my recollection, I’m going to I’m going to America one day, and then it’s very hard to get a visa to the US. So I was 21 I was in college in Hungary actually. So I was raised in I was born and raised in Transylvania, but I’m Hungarian by nationality. So I went to Hungary in college in Hungary. And in the third year, we were supposed to take an English exam. And my professor said to me, I’m never got to speak English, like literally failed English. And I said, Okay, well, that’s going to have to change because I have to pass that to get my diploma. So I figured the easiest way to learn the language is to go and live with the ones that speak it. So that was my second kind of action of okay, I’m going to America, the only way at the time was to be an au pair. And so I applied with an Au Pair agency, a family here in Brighton, Michigan picked me and that’s how I ended up in Brighton, Michigan, out of all places.

D.J. Paris 9:02
What and then how the move to real estate from being an au pair.

Gogo Bethke 9:08
So I press like a little bit of a process of elimination. You know, I tried anything from data entry in a warehouse to sales in a jewelry store, to coding company, to being a waitress. I mean, I’ve done a little bit of everything trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. And I was a stay at home mom at the time when my neighbor who’s the marketing director of Capitol title came to me and she’s like, you’re so social. You have so many friends. You should be a realtor. I already talked to real estate one, go and talk to them. And so I was like, I watch HGTV. Sure sounds like a great idea. Like that’s, that’s all I did. And they look make it look so easy on HGTV like it’s a walk in a park. I joke and usually say Jurassic Park, but it’s a walk. It’s a walk in the park. And so I went in and talked to real estate one. They are one of the largest real estate companies here in the state of Michigan. But They’re family owned, and they are only in the state of Michigan. They offered me the job. They said, If I pass, they will pay for my school. So I paid upfront, but they reimburse me with my first closing. And so I was with them for six and a half years I was the baby, I was about 30 years younger than the average agent in the office. And I really had a really good like, I always joke and say, I could get away with murder, but I really could just do whatever might be the heart desired. And so that’s where my real estate career started.

D.J. Paris 10:25
So how did you with really no sphere of influence? And I mean, other than, I guess you knew the family that you’d worked for, and you had other jobs but but really no established base of clientele. And also brand new to the industry? How did you build your How did you find your first client, for example?

Gogo Bethke 10:42
So you and I thought about this, I don’t remember who my first client was. And I have to go to the files and see who they were and how they got to me, but probably, within so let me tell you this story. So I was so excited. When I went into the office, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is gonna be awesome. It’s so easy. I watch HGTV is going to be just like that. And I think give me an office and it had a window and I was like, whoo, I made it. It’s not a corner office, but it has a window. So it’s not a cubicle, I’m doing good. And yeah, I you know, I’m very social, like I’m a social butterfly, I’ll talk to anyone. So I went around at every office, and I introduced myself and I talked to them, and I wanted to pick their brain and see how they do things. And I remember my excitement went lower and lower with every door I opened, realizing that hold on a minute, everything they are doing, or I don’t feel comfortable doing or I don’t have the budget for it. So many of them were you know, cold calling. So every day they would call call from at less than three hours a day 250 calls, maybe you know, 24 of them will answer seven of them, they get a face to face, one out of the seven will actually sign as a client. And I can not call it God like it’s so it’s against every bone in my body. It gives me the heebie jeebies. I cannot beg someone for their business, I was like, I can’t do that. So then went to the next office. And then she was like, well, we spend $4,000, our marketing budget this month. And I was like, I just want to make $4,000 Like, I don’t have $4,000 to spend. And so slowly by you know, entering every door, I was like, okay, hold on a minute, like, this is not gonna work for me. And so I figured out I also knew I’m a researcher. So anything I put my mind to, I will get to the end of YouTube and and Google to see what it’s truly about. And I realized that 80% of the agents will give up in the first two year. And I’m also very competitive by nature. So I’m no loser. Like, if I start something, I will finish it. And I will finish on the top. So I was like, okay, so I cannot be part of that statistic. So what I know what I’m not willing to do. So I’m not door knocking, I am not cold calling. I’m not spending $6,000. I’m not buying Zillow leads, I’m not doing this and that. So what am I willing to do? And so and what I can’t, what can I afford to do? And that what came down to Facebook? At that time? I was like, Okay, I start a page, which probably I was one of the first ones that had a Facebook page at the time. You know, what, eight, eight years ago? Yeah, nine years ago, something like that. Eight years. Yeah. 2011. And so that’s how I started, I just started posting everything, posting things. And I’m like, This is what I learned today. Because a lot of things that you imagine this is how you go, how it’s going to be in the real estate industry and come to find out nothing like it. So I would share things like that I would share silly things that I saw at homes and pictures of like, What the heck is this? And then people would comment, or that’s an old gas tank or oil tank from the 1800s. You know, I mean, so things like that would would keep them entertained. And it wasn’t just like, oh, this is my newest listing. This is the, you know, the open house I’m holding this weekend, it wasn’t like that. And to be honest with you, it wasn’t like that originally, right? Because I

D.J. Paris 13:29
didn’t didn’t have things to brag about.

Gogo Bethke 13:33
Exactly. So I had to post the stuff that this is what I learned this is what’s going on, this is my hustle, that kind of stuff. And it just kind of realized that that’s the that’s the stuff that gets the interaction. When I did started getting listings that I would post that it would maybe get one or two likes, never really gets a comment. Nobody really cares that you got a listing because they not on the market for a new home. They follow you because they find it exciting to see your progress in an in an industry. And so that’s pretty much what opened my eyes to what’s working and what doesn’t because you see the interaction. Yeah, I just want to pause for

D.J. Paris 14:01
a second because this is my belief. And I want to get your opinion on this. And because I have this in again, my backgrounds, I’m a marketing guy, I was in the IT field, I worked in health care I was in anyway, I couldn’t be further away from real estate. And, and when I when I got into real estate, and I started paying attention to how realtors use social media, it was mostly Hey, look at my new listing or look at my award that I’ve won. And look and that’s nice and fun. And there’s you know, nothing inherently wrong with doing that. But there’s a little part of me because you talked about hey, there were things I don’t do or I won’t do it just doesn’t fit my personality, cold calling door knocking buying leads you didn’t have the budget for but these were things that just were like, well, that’s just not me. And I always thought when I looked at realtors and it seemed to be that’s about all they posted were Hey, look at this new deal I just closed. There’s a little part of me that was turned off by that. And I don’t mean to for our listeners who do that. Like I’m not here to judge that if that works for you. Great. But there’s I, as a consumer and somebody not from this industry always thought, well, like, I don’t brag about all my awards and things for my career. So I always felt that was sort of a strange thing to do. And I don’t I wonder if it even turns people off a little bit? Possibly. I mean, again, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just, I’m just have that opinion that I’m not I don’t really love it when people brag on Facebook.

Gogo Bethke 15:24
Yeah, so I think if you don’t show the process, because I show the process of how I got there, it’s exciting because they can all celebrate with me, because they all follow the process. They follow the ups and downs of it. You know, I mean, like, I just met with somebody and they’re like, did you get that listing? Because I posted the video how one of my listings expired, my very first listing that ever expired, and it’s a hit to the ego. You know, I mean, like, I tried everything I possibly can. And I could just not sell that house, I can tell you why. So in the meantime, my husband got licensed, and he was like, Do you mind if I take a shot at it? And I was like, No, go ahead. He’s like, can you come to the appointment with me? I’m like, well, that’s kind of uncomfortable. Exactly. And my husband is like, Are you seriously going to put your ego in front of a paycheck in front of putting food on the table for your family? And I was like, You know what, you’re right. So I ended up going to appointment with him. I created a quick little video prior to that I do most of my bragging so seven worst of my life, you know, showing my life in real estate and Instagram that automatically feeds to Facebook. So it did this little video, I said, Hey, we are heading to a listing appointment. It’s kind of painful, because, you know, this listing was mine, and it expired. And now my husband’s taking a shot at it. And so this was couple of weeks ago, I’m in New York meeting with an agent who I’ve never met. First question out of his mouth was did you get the listing? And I was like, wow, like it does work. People want to read you. And if you share the process, not just like, hey, I’m the best in the industry. If you don’t, if you don’t show the process, how you got there to be the best in the industry than it is bragging. But if you show the hustle in the meantime, and you’re celebrating what

D.J. Paris 16:58
people want, and you know, study after study, and just we all know this in our heart that everyone wants to connect in the way that we connect is through vulnerability, right? And so you had the courage to say, Hey, guys, this is kind of a painful thing. I wasn’t able to sell this home, but and probably nobody ever posts about that. That is never done right. Everyone just posted their success but that’s what everybody wants. People want to connect because that’s real life, right? They want to know your actual real life.

Gogo Bethke 17:30
Yeah, yeah. And I also don’t like when all they do is negative logo. This doesn’t work out on my deal fell apart or you know what I mean? If things like that, that also doesn’t work. But if you’re just truly showing your hardship not to be negative Nancy about it, but you’re showing that hey, listen, yes, my my listing expired. But here I am, put my big girl pants on and put my ego aside, I’m back I go. I’m trying to get the listing for my husband this time. I think that just shows you that you’re human, you’re not perfect. And even though I tried my best is wasn’t good enough. And we are still plugging away at it. We’ve tried to sell that home, because at the end of the day, that’s my sellers best. That’s their need. And our job is to get me donate.

D.J. Paris 18:10
So yeah, let’s talk a little bit about social media and how you think about it. So what I don’t know if you want to start with a particular, you know, medium, like if you want to start with Instagram, or Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, but or just your overall philosophy, but what what do brokers Miss? What are they doing wrong? Other than we just mentioned, only posting, hey, look at this great new listing. And if that’s all you do, you know, there’s more you can do. So tell us a little bit about your thoughts and how you grew your following.

Gogo Bethke 18:40
Yeah, so I originally, as I said, it started on Facebook. So I created a Facebook page, and I was a little bit more careful. I was that I wouldn’t want to say that typical realtor. But yeah, I posted my listings in my open houses. And in between I posted this and that it was more personal than more most agents make it but I still had that homes and open houses stuff. And then about four years in, I started getting to the point where most of the people who followed me on Facebook for my clients, and I was getting to the point where I needed to, can I use this word bitch beep it out if you have to. I just had to like vent a little bit and Mitch a little bit about the process because there’s the ugly side of real estate, the cutthroat side of real estate, the ones that if you don’t have thick skin, you’re never gonna make it. And so I felt like I needed to talk about that I just kind of released that because if not, it piles up and you’re gonna blow up and leave the industry. And so I wanted to release it. So I started my Instagram account. Same thing goes real estate. All platforms are Google’s real estate. That’s very, very important, by the way that all of your names are the same on every platform. We can talk about that in a minute. But so I started Instagram, just so I can vent and because I was showing the good, bad and the ugly side of being a realtor on Instagram, most of my following on Instagram automatically just became Realtors because they were the one being able or entrepreneurs I should say because there’s a lot of entrepreneurs as well, business owners that just can relate of dealing with clients and and egos and how that goes down on the day to day basis. So, um, yes, I started Instagram. And a few years later, I always had a LinkedIn. But I didn’t have a huge LinkedIn presence because I wasn’t posting very often, I just had it more. So if people Google me, then I look legit. And now I also feed everything over to Instagram, from Instagram to LinkedIn. So usually, I make my posts on Instagram. And then I choose which one goes where. So for example, let’s say if there is a selfie, or I’m on a beach, enjoying the fruits of my labor, that works perfectly fine on Instagram, but it won’t go very well on Facebook, and it really not gonna go well on LinkedIn. So you just kind of have to understand the three platforms and how they work and how they are different from one another. LinkedIn is the most professional one bathing suit photo is not going to work on their Facebook, it’s okay, but bathing suit photo, it’s kind of pushing it. And Instagram just kind of goes whatever you want to do. So you kind of feel your audience and each platform. So because I post everything from Instagram, I pick and choose of which one I’m going to send where. So sometimes I send it to all three, sometimes I like not LinkedIn material, I’m not going to push it over to return. So as soon as the more time you spend on these platforms, you realize how you fit in, and what you should and should not post on these platforms, and it will grow your audience because you are posting the stuff that they want to see.

D.J. Paris 21:23
Yeah, I mean that for all of our listeners, you should constantly be thinking just as you think about when you work with your clients, and you say, I wonder what it’s like for them to go through this home buying or home selling process. And in particular, if it’s somebody who’s buying their first property, we know how scary that is. Or at least you should know how scary it is because it’s very scary. And it’s a huge deal for any first time homebuyer and brokers always need to remember just how difficult that is for the client. And they can then you know, have empathy and compassion and actually communicate in a way to alleviate a client’s fear, right? So we all know that we’re supposed to do that. Put yourself in the client’s shoes, make sure they’re comfortable, walk them through everything. Same thing goes for social media, right? So if you know, hey, what do my Instagram followers want and need? What is my Facebook followers want need? You can start developing content based around those needs.

Gogo Bethke 22:16
Yeah, so it’s kind of it’s it’s kind of cool. Because when you create a page on these profiles, so I don’t have personal, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have personal accounts and all of these profiles, but I do not do business on personal. So everything real estate related my business life, my hustle is on Google’s real estate, which is a business page. Now when you have a business page on these platforms, it gives you what’s called the insight. So these are the numbers in the background. This is how if you want to invest, and ads or boosting, then you know where and who you need to target and what time of the day and what city because you see where your audience is. So because you see the inside, you see what they liked how many people commented, you know what to post because the proof is in the pudding. It shows you this have the biggest head so you know, I need to post more like this.

D.J. Paris 22:57
Yeah, so this is really important for everyone listening. So all social media platforms, especially with the business, like for example, I use Facebook a lot for our podcast. And every day we post links to articles that we find online that would benefit broker realtors to grow their business. And but then we were always looking at our insights and some of our stuff gets no likes at all. And I go, that’s unfortunate, because this was a really great article. Well, guess what? DJ, nobody cared. So. So as much as I think it was cool. Turns out it didn’t work very well. Okay, no big deal. Now I have that data. And sometimes when we’ll post like a little silly meme, well, that might get more traffic. Okay, well, people seem to like, you know, that sort of thing. videos get a certain certain type of reaction. So the good news is, this is all free, these tools are free, the analytics are free. And if you’re not looking at it, and it only takes a minute or so every week to really look at it. I mean, it depends how often you’re posting, but you need to know what your audience is responding to. Otherwise, you’re just throwing darts in a dark room at a dartboard? You’re not even sure where it is.

Gogo Bethke 24:00
Exactly. So I love the fact like I speak three languages so for me numbers come very quick if you if you think think about it, I still think in Hungarian translate and speak in English, there’s a you know, three second delay. When I look at numbers, I don’t have to translate numbers numbers make sense? In the same language no matter what language mind you’re looking at it numbers number. So when I look at it inside it, it’s just it’s awesome. I can understand it right away. It shows the backside of my business. It shows that if I want to throw 10 bucks at Instagram, where should I spend it, you always want the best return on your investment. So you want to spend the least amount and get the best return and insight allows you to do that allows you to see who’s following you what is their age range. Where are they located? What time of the day they look at it what they looked at, and then you know what type of people to target when you are boosting something?

D.J. Paris 24:45
Yeah, let’s talk let’s talk about Instagram. Let’s let’s focus on that because obviously it’s one of the biggest players in the social media space. realtors use it and but very few realtors use it in a way that’s really serving them. So We’ll talk a little bit about mistakes that you see Realtors make and maybe some solutions.

Gogo Bethke 25:06
So one of the biggest mistakes I mean, let’s let’s let’s dissect it. So open up your Instagram and go to your profile. Most agents don’t even say that they are a realtor. Huge mistake, because they don’t say where they are realtor, that’s even a bigger mistake. Because if I’m looking for a Brighton, Michigan realtor, I’m going to go to hashtags and I’m going to put in hashtag Brighton realtor, writer, Michigan realtor. So then everybody who ever used that hashtag is going to find me same with your Chicago realtor or Chicago real estate. I’m going to go in there, I’m going to hashtag Chicago real estate search for that hashtag and see who pops up anybody who ever used that hashtag will pop up. That’s how they’re going to find you. So if you don’t put that into your bio, if you don’t have hashtag realtor, when somebody searches for realtors, you’re not going to find you. It think of it as Google search words. If I’m going Google and I need a Chicago realtor, I’m probably going to put in Chicago realtor. And I’m going to click in the top three, that’s going to pop up same with Instagram when you hashtag that it’s your search words when somebody hashtag or searches for that word, you’re going to pop up as a result. And that’s very, very important. Also your brokerage. I work with exp so for me it’s very important for people to know that I’m with exp. So it says my name gogo Baqi, how I hold license and it says brokered by exp. And I think every agent, no matter if they’re kW, ReMax, whatever whoever they are, where they should be proud of that. And I also think it’s I don’t know if it’s the same in every state, but it is a state regulation in Michigan where you have to disclose who your brokerage is. So if you have a business page, you should have your brokerage under because in the end of the day, you work under their umbrella. So you should if you have any links, so for example, Instagram only allows you to have one link in your profile. And one link for us is never going to cut it because there’s so many different things that I do. I mean, there’s public speaking events, there is giveaways that I do there is my websites than I do. There is my blog was bootcamp than I do. I mean, my listings, my open houses, my team, you name it, if they if someone wants to plug themself into my calendar, there is access to my calendar, because Instagram only allows you to have only one link. Most people don’t even go further to figure out is there a way for me to include multiple links? Yes, there is. It’s called link tree. So it’s li n k, t or e. So you go to link tree, that platform allows you to add multiple links to one link only. So then after you created your link to go back, you plug that into your profile. Now it looks like you have one link and when somebody clicks it, it’s going to take you to the profile, take them to your profile, it’s going to show you all of the different things that you provide.

D.J. Paris 27:36
Yeah, I’m actually looking at link tree right now because I was not familiar. So guys, just Google link tree and look it up. Because this is a funny, this is really funny. So before we were speaking, before we started recording, I are actually yesterday, go go had said, Hey, what’s your guys’s Instagram, I want to take a look and see what you’re doing. And I said, we don’t have one. And I knew that she was she was so polite, because I knew she was about to say, Hey, dummy, you need to do that. And here’s what I said. I said, Well, the reason we don’t have one is because it’s really hard to link to our things. Because it only has one link, it’s in the bio, no one’s gonna see it. Yeah, you could put the link in the comments, but I don’t know that anyone’s gonna see it. And you were very quiet. And I knew you were just being polite. And I was like, I should probably ask her, there’s gotta be some solution. Yeah, and

Gogo Bethke 28:22
you can do and you can do swipe ups as well, you can create ads with with swipe up. So in order to swipe up organically without a fee, you have to have 10,000 followers. But if you create an ad, you can do a swipe up if you’re paying for the advertising. So you can always do that if you don’t have 10,000. But as soon as you have 10,000, then you can do organically a swipe up and just take them directly to this. So right now we could have taken like a call on Instagram, for example, where your face and my face is on the same screen, we could have screenshotted that and we say hey guys alive. Come see us. Here’s a swipe up listening to our podcasts and you take them directly to the site where you want them to listen in, which I did or that are already a couple of days ago for you. I just didn’t know, I just didn’t know when we’re going live. So as soon as I know the date, then I can disclose it again. And they can go and go to the direct episode. And listen.

D.J. Paris 29:10
So this is huge for us too. Because you know, and I’m somebody who I do all of the social media for our company and also for for this podcast. Well, we I have some help with that too. But this is something we’re not doing. And this is an opportunity because, you know, I didn’t even know myself How should I be using Instagram for this podcast? So this is yeah, I can I can hear you. Well, you’re already helping our listeners. So guys, what let’s just recap a few things that gogo sets, you can actually take this and start using it right. So as the first thing she said is you need to work on your bio. So go into Instagram, go into your bio, you of course want to want to use link tree to be able to link to various things, but you want to make sure your hashtags are there. And just because you don’t search by hashtags and Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, other P or LinkedIn even other people Do right so so go go. You might say, Well, gosh, you know how many people are searching for Brighton realtor? Well, I guarantee at least one person is a month and it’s probably more than that. And I guarantee that probably go goes the only person that has that in her Instagram profile.

Gogo Bethke 30:15
I mean, I got a I got a message couple of days ago with somebody from Brighton Michigan annoyed that my posts always pop up in the Brighton Michigan area. I was like, I’m gonna you know, you don’t have to look at it like you can skip it, you can unfollow me, because well, why do you always hashtag Brighton, I said, because my business is in Brighton. So if I have something going on in Brighton, I’m going to, I’m going to tag the location because I want everybody from Brighton and their mother know that I’m a realtor in the Brighton area. And if I happen to be in New York, then I’m going to tag New York because I want everybody in New York to know that I exist. And if I can help them with their social media, then they can find my existence. You know, I mean, so there’s so much power in social media. And I wish I could go through all of these, all of these tabs for you. But I’ll give you two more tips that are very, very important. That comes with your Instagram bio. So the photo, the photo has to be and I emphasize has to be the same on every platform. You can if you Google me, you will see the lady in the red dress and every single profile that I have. If and when I decide to change it, I’m going to change it on every single profile as well. The reason why I do that is because you want that brand recognition. If you close your eyes, and I say imagine Starbucks, can you imagine it? The target logo. So that’s what you want to achieve. You want people to close their eyes. And imagine that lady in the red dress, and her name is Gaga.

D.J. Paris 31:36
I will say that gogo chick has shown up already in all the communication you and I and our team has had. It is the lady in the red dress with the blonde hair. That that is you. Yeah, it’s my cross. Every

Gogo Bethke 31:52
email signature is my yard sign. It’s my Instagram profile, my LinkedIn profile, my business cards, my you name it, it’s it. And you want people to recognize and I also do recommend have this photo 30 years from now. So if you don’t look like that lady anymore, you have to change it. I also meet with agents, they look nothing.

D.J. Paris 32:10
Oh, and by the way, let’s talk about that for a moment. This is a little bit of side two from social media. But if you don’t look like your picture, because by the way, I understand the inclination to smooth out every wrinkle and to look perfect. And but if you don’t look like that, don’t use it because you want to look real, right? Because when people

Gogo Bethke 32:28
that’s the way I look at it when I run into an agent that looks nothing like themselves. It’s their high school photo. And now they’re 62. And I meet you You already lie to me. Exactly, exactly. You already lied to my face. So why would I ever take you seriously if you look nothing like that person. I’m not saying if you follow me you will say thank God for Mako of course, because you will see a lot of videos and I look here at and then you see a lot of videos when I look at. And it’s thanks to makeup, it’s really the only thing in between. So you do have to show your real side, I’m just saying Don’t show your side from 20 years ago, show your current side with or without makeup with or without bra, whatever is your daily style is just your real sight. So then they don’t feel like you already lied to them when they need to.

D.J. Paris 33:09
And we need to remember and everyone needs to remember is people don’t relate to perfection. They relate to imperfection, people connect, they connect with real when gogo made the video for us. I mean, she looks nice, she always looks nice. But she there’s I don’t know, if you’re wearing any makeup or very little makeup, you looked like a real person. And you said, guys, here’s what I think I can do to help you. Do you know how authentic and honest that was, it wasn’t a sales pitch. It was hey, I’d really love to get on your show. I think I have some value to add. And let’s do it. And it was so refreshingly honest, and not polished. But really, it was your authentic self coming through. And that’s I think one of the biggest lessons in social media is tell the real story tell the truth.

Gogo Bethke 33:53
Yeah, so when you decide to take the route of social media, you also can’t fluff numbers, you can’t, you know, make things look better. You just have to show the good, bad and the ugly, like the true side of your business, and then he never bites you in the butt. The problem is when you try to fluff something, because it makes it look better about yourself. And then the truth always comes to surface and that is just, it’s going to bite you. So don’t do that. So if you decide that you want to take the route of social media, you have to disclose right away, then you always will say

D.J. Paris 34:21
that I don’t want to go back to you posting, you know, content around not being able to sell a property and how disappointed you were in that that result. And I will tell you Look if I’m looking to hire a realtor, and obviously I want somebody who knows what they’re doing and is successful, but I love the fact that somebody would be upset and willing to share that gosh, you know, this didn’t work and I we’re not exactly sure why and I’m really upset about it or I’m sad about it.

Gogo Bethke 34:48
Can you imagine showing up at that appointment

D.J. Paris 34:51
and the appointment going

Gogo Bethke 34:55
on? My husband is pitching everything that he can bring then I couldn’t do

D.J. Paris 34:59
it again. That’s life. And that happens, right? And so instead of pretending that everything doesn’t go that everything goes perfectly which it never does, you know, people connect to the, to the real stuff. And, and look, we feel sad when our friends are sad. And when somebody’s you know, struggling in whatever way, we want to know that so we can provide support. And even though your social media followers aren’t necessarily your friends, although some of them will, can and will be, they want they want to cheer you on, and they want to know what’s really happening. So I love the fact that yeah,

Gogo Bethke 35:30
I met so many awesome people through and that’s the other thing, so many opportunities come of it. Some agents were like, well, I posted and I didn’t get a lead, when it doesn’t work like that. You know, I mean, I posted I actually did the math one time I posted I think over 37,000 times in the last eight years. And that, you know, that took me to about $45 million in production. So I broke it down to what does that and how many posts I had in this time. And then what does that mean income mean and commission. So it comes out to be about $32 a post. So the way I look at it, it’s not necessarily that you’re going to get a lead from this. From one like, I got an opportunity to go to a Tony Robbins event for free as Tony’s guests because of Instagram, I get free stuff, I get invited to events I get, you know, I get access to places and people that otherwise I would have never know of their existence, they would have never known of mine. I have people reach out to me all the time. They are in like North Carolina and like oh my gosh, I wish you were in our area, I would love for you to be my realtor, we are buying our first house or whatever the scenario may be. And I usually I’m like, I know I can be the leg on the ground. But guess what, I have an awesome team member in the area, then I would love to make the recommendation. Can I have your number and email address and I’ll introduce you guys and they usually give it to me, I introduce them and that right there is a 25% referral fee. So that’s money that you’re able to make by all you need to do is respond to someone’s message by letting them know that you’re a realtor, they reach out to you. And the next thing you know, you make the introduction and 25% of a referral fee, it ends up usually being 1500 hours or more. I mean, that’s 1500 hours that you personally didn’t have to work for all you did is made an introduction right.

D.J. Paris 37:01
Well, let’s talk about the content. So aside from we sort of joked about posting some of the hard stuff, you know that the challenges but but on a day to day basis, what do you recommend for for realtors, to what kind of content? Should they be curating and producing? And how often?

Gogo Bethke 37:21
Yeah, so for me, social media is not for everybody. So if you want to take it serious, so the way I look at it, this is my job. So when I decided that I’m not going to cold call and not going to Dornoch, I decided okay, for those three hours where the other agent is door knocking at cold calling, that’s what I need to do, I need to do social media. So then I would post I would comment on other people’s, they would respond to mine, I would create video content, things like that. So I look at it that it’s my job. This is how I’m going to feed my family and continue to have money coming in. So I take it very seriously. So if somebody wants to build it to this level, then I recommend them to look at it. And it’s their job. And definitely post stories every single day. So at least 10 stories a day, you have your cell phone with you, I never go anywhere without my cell phone. So whatever is happening, I literally just grabbed my phone and take a quick video or take a quick photo, or things like that. You can do swipe ups, you can take locations, you can take people your way, you can steal their audience, and they can steal yours, you can show the events that you’re going to so you can gain the expertise. So set in their eyes, because they can follow along of your progress posts, I usually do the actual so there’s a difference between story and feed. When you visit someone’s profile, the photos and the videos that you see on their profile that’s called their feed, that is going to be there forever. The stories are the ones when you visit someone’s profile, you click their profile photo. And those are 15 second little video snippets into their life into their daily life. So you actually get to follow along with their days. So those stories, I would recommend at least 10 a day, make it as personal as possible and add a bunch of selfies, you actually have to show who you are and talk about what you stand for and show your hustle and your ethics and all that. And then posting probably once or twice a day into your actual feed.

D.J. Paris 39:07
Yeah, and so for those of you that aren’t familiar with Instagram Stories, this is a way to tell your ongoing narrative, right? This is what’s happening to me, you know, today, and just you can just repeat that and it can be these short little snippets. I always say imperfect is better. So the lighting doesn’t have to be exact. You know, you can have the shaky camera and just get out there and tell what tell what’s going on in your life.

Gogo Bethke 39:35
Exactly. Exactly. And the stories people you showing your real sight so people get to relate. So they follow you because you’re not selling them something, you know your value because your life is interesting.

D.J. Paris 39:46
Yeah, and we should also we should also mention that that you do not live in a place if you live in a lovely area, but a very a place where there’s not it’s not a lot of what’s going on. There’s not much going on. All right, you’re not you’re not in a major city. There’s not you’re not showing this, this sort of glamorous, exciting fly by the seat of your pants life, right? You’re out in a rural area.

Gogo Bethke 40:11
Yeah. So I’m in the boonies of Michigan, we live off of a dirt road, everybody around us have at least an acre, takes 15 minutes to get to the highway. So it’s, it’s totally not that gated community fancy schmancy with chandeliers and champagnes all day long. So it’s not nothing like that. It’s, you know, like we were listing a house today, it’s $182,000, it’s pretty average for this area, nice home, two bedroom, all that. So when my husband goes out there, and for the photoshoot today, of course, he’s going to take photos and videos of that. So we let the market know that this is coming, he tags me so I can share it as well. So there’s just so much you can do with the power of social media can potentially sell it before it even hits the MLS. I mean, we get the the three day prior to he just listed period, you can also do that. I mean, this way you don’t have to buy from the Zillow is and the and the other lead generating sources, when you can become your own lead generation system.

D.J. Paris 41:03
How long should somebody? So I’ll give you an example of our podcasts because one of the questions that people will ask is, okay, so I’m posting on a regular basis to my Instagram, or Facebook, or whatever social media platform that that you find works for you. Or rather, maybe none of them are immediately working for you and you but you like one better than the other. So you commit to Instagram or Facebook. And and this is the same thing that happened to our website, or sorry, our podcast, when I first started it, I told my boss, I said, I really want to do this, I think it’s a good thing for the industry. And I won’t even mention where I work. So I don’t want people to think I’m using this as a recruiting platform, I’m legitimately just going to try to provide this value. And I hope people like it. And he said to me, Hey, that’s great. It’s a good idea, and we should do it. But you have to commit for a year, you have to do it for a year. And by the way, you know, doing couple episodes a week for a year with no listeners is not the most fun thing to do, right. But as a result now now all of a sudden, we have 100 plus episodes, we have national sponsors, we have an audience of 1000s and 1000s per episode, I never thought it would get to the level it does. And and now I’m going to obviously continue to do it. But it took at least a year before we saw any real major growth. So how do you find that that works in social media?

Gogo Bethke 42:21
Let’s see exactly the same. I mean, it takes time for people, you have to create the content. So just by creating one folder and posting it, you’re not going to have the 40,000 followers show up on as your content goes viral, and you just did something so out of the ordinary which most people don’t feel comfortable doing. So it is a progress. I mean, just like any other job to become good at it, you have to give it some time and effort. And you have to be consistent, just as you said. So yeah, try it for a year. And especially if you do a page you see your results. So when you post something you realize, hold on a minute, this didn’t work. So don’t do any more things like that, post something else and see how that works. So my butcher, what do they call it error, trial and error. You’ll figure out what works, what’s your style, or people that your people your, your crowd wants to see and listen to. And you post more of that. And eventually, I mean, it’s not like I woke up one morning and I have 40,000 followers like this is seven years in.

D.J. Paris 43:12
Yeah. And I want to I want to tell listeners a great story. And we’ll call this the myth of going viral. And this relates to something gogo said earlier about getting to attend a Tony Robbins event based on her her Instagram. And so a very similar thing happened to me. So in this, I totally forgot about this until you just said it. But it’s a great lesson for everyone. And so I went to a Tony Robbins event, I don’t know, let’s say 10 years ago. And back then I was writing a blog, and I need to get back to writing my blog. But I would a pretty successful blog, me successful meaning I had 1000s of people that read it. And I was posting almost every day, it didn’t make any money. It was more just for fun, but I had a decent following. I never figured out how to monetize it. But that’s okay. It wasn’t really trying to. But I got back from this Tony Robbins event. And I thought of a really funny thing that happened at during the event. And I’m a humor writer. So I wasn’t trying to write a motivational piece. I was just sharing this kind of interesting, funny thing that happened. So I wrote it didn’t think anything of it. Well, somehow. And of course, I promote all of my blog posts on the various social media channels. And at the time, Instagram really wasn’t a thing. So it was Facebook, LinkedIn, I had not even LinkedIn it was Facebook and Twitter. So Facebook and Twitter is where I posted it. Well, somehow it got to Tony’s people, they sent it while they said they sent it to Tony, who actually knows but somebody saw it. And then Tony Robbins tweeted it out. And I didn’t ask him to just kind of randomly happen. And what happened is he has millions of followers on Twitter, of course. And so immediately what happened is they sent me a message they said, Tony just tweeted out your story. We just wanted to say thank you. He thought it was funny or whatever. So again, who knows we actually wrote it, read it, but they sent out a tweet from his account about my story. And I thought oh my gosh, I this is amazing. And I was watching my analytics and all of a sudden with about 10 minute period 30,000 people visited my website and it safely, it didn’t crash, it almost crashed. Because when you have that kind of traffic 10 years ago, I didn’t have the bandwidth to support it. But thankfully, it didn’t crash. So all these people read my stuff. And I went, Oh, they’re going to fall in love with me. This is amazing. I now have made it, these people are going to read every word I wrote. And then here’s what happened two days later, it was back to the normal traffic, right? Because it didn’t change my life it and I realized, okay, I have to go back to the drawing board and just keep writing content. And I you know, so it’s not like gogo had this unbelievable picture or video on Instagram, and all of a sudden got 20,000 additional followers, she posted 30,000 times over eight years. And and even if you did go viral once, maybe that would have like, it happened to me, it just kind of falls away after a few days and life goes back to normal.

Gogo Bethke 45:49
Yeah, I mean, I do get when you have your insight, you see what’s you know what’s there. And in weekly basis, I reach about a quarter million people. So in a month, about a million people that I reach. So that’s a huge amount of touch. I mean, just imagine I’m nobody, I’m a little girl from Romania, Transylvania out of all places. So if I can do it, anybody can do it. But that shows you right there. If if I can reach a million people a month, imagine what everybody else can do if they just put their mind to it.

D.J. Paris 46:14
Right? But the in the secret is you have to commit to consistency, right? So like gogo said, look, make sure make sure your profiles are set up correctly, have a nice picture that looks like you and make sure it’s consistent. It’s on your website. It’s on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, everything is consistent and the same. Now I want to talk just real quickly about content. So aside from stories, you say, hey, a couple times a day on Instagram, you make a post? What do you recommend as far as content for realtors to sort of talk about an Instagram, which is a very visual, obviously, it’s a visual medium. So what do you sort of suggest? And what don’t you suggest?

Gogo Bethke 46:51
Well, I do a little bit of everything. So I do usually six photos and a quote. So every six posts I do is a quote usually my quotes or something I come up with about probably 75% of the time. Sometimes it’s called done, I still sometimes it’s a meme. That’s really funny, just as you said, I posted when a couple of days about a couple of days ago about an offer being sent over via fax. And I was like, listen, Susan, I can’t fax from where I live. And she goes, where do you live? Like I live in 2019 you can fax from here, but he just said listen, Susan and I just thought it was so funny. So I shared that and he got a huge I think over 12,000 views and stuff. So things like that. So every six is a quote I think codes just show who you are and shows your character and people get to relate to you and so if they if they’re quirky, just like you are you just found your own monkeys, you just found your own group of people that if you were to put in the same room, you could talk until the end of the world and nobody would be bored. So that’s why that’s why I do the quotes because I want people to get to know me and how I work and what I stand for. And then find photos so to be honest with you, the ones that you are in personally works the best so if you have a listing let’s see that comes up make sure that you are in the photo take the photo in the best part of the house let’s see is the kitchen the best part of the house then you take a photo in the best part of the house maybe you sit on the kitchen counter with your arms up in this you know in a Fest and you’re like oh my gosh I’m so excited I just got this listing is going to be listed for 430,000 is three bedroom two bath 1500 square feet located you know walking distance from downtown Dallas or wherever you’re at. So this way they actually something captured their eyes because they happy for your excitement. Most people are in the market in average every seven years for six months for a new home. So your newest listing is no excitement to them at all whatsoever if they’re not on the market for a home just like that, or they might not even be in your area. So why on earth should they follow you and your newest listing and Pinckney Michigan, you know, I mean, so you have to give you have to be in the photos and you’ll see the more you share about yourself and your success and downtimes in the real estate market, the more followers you’re going to have. So I do probably out of the six I probably do three photos of me one quote and two photos of like interior design or travel or something like that, then, you know, even though I’m a realtor, I love traveling. I mean, I work to travel so I can spend my money in other places and countries. And so that’s that’s my what is it that dangled the carrot and the end of my success rope. And so I share things that you know, excite me and whatever I stand for. So I think it’s very important for the agent to be in about a good 50 60% of it. And by

D.J. Paris 49:26
the way, you can always turn the camera on yourself to if you’re in a property that that your your listing or you just listed and there’s something really cool or unique about it. Like gogo was saying at the beginning. She would take pictures of cool things she saw in homes and say, Hey, what did does anyone know what this is? Or this is really cool. You can literally turn the camera on yourself and highlight something say guys, I just have to show you this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. And you can show that right and that again, whatever gets you excited comes through and it has to be authentic, right. It’s so so so that’s something that you can do it Every single listing, there’s something in that house that you think is already on the outside of the house, or the landscaping, that something is cool. And you really should get excited and say, Guys, I’m so excited about this listing. Let me show you the garden. I have to show this to you. And then

Gogo Bethke 50:14
yeah, when I had one of my one of my videos that went viral, it was also I don’t know, if you saw it, it was a while ago, it was talking about I got so sad, discriminated against. So we go into multiple interviewing process for a listing, and they narrow it down to me and this other guy, and then they end up calling me. So it was the grandstand and I was talking to the grandstand cause because while grandpa grandma really likes, likes you and would like to work with you, but they were wondering if you have a different business card, because your business card is a little rusty. And I was like, okay, caught me off guard for a second. And I was thinking, hold on a minute, what do what do my boobs have to do with my ability selling their home? My boobs, the fact that I’m a woman, and I have the absurd and I’ve canceled out my brain. Okay, you can have you can have both you can have booze and brain at the same time. It’s not against, you know, biology. And I was thinking for a second and I told the guy who said he listed? So since my body parts is that question here it, it really, it’s a decision making factor, and my ability of selling their home? How big is the other guys? How big is that? Since we’re talking about how big my boobs are? How big is his, and I use the D word to be honest with you. And it caught them off guard and guess who got the job? I did. Because in the end of the day, really all you’re deciding if I can sell your house, based on the fact that I have boobs? Did you did you ask him to show his his size or it’s only just my boob size that is questioning question here. So by showing what really goes down in the real estate market, and what it takes to get a listing and the discrimination and the and the thick skin that you have to have some times in order to make it, it just really shows all the other agents that they are not the only ones that are going through this because trust me, we all go through this in order to make it you go through a whole lot of I don’t even know what the right word is to use here. It’s not all roses and pink butterflies to make it in this industry. So I think if you can share all that the truth, everything that really goes down, not just the pretty bad, the ugly to it will get the other agents and the end the industry and everybody that has any interest in in real life to follow you. Because it’s interesting.

D.J. Paris 52:21
And had you not got that listing, I imagine that becomes something you content for your social media to write Had that not fall in your way if somebody decided, well, you know this, for whatever reason, they just didn’t like the way you physically presented yourself. And you know, that could happen, right? And that’s outside of your control. And somebody just goes well, I don’t like the fact that she’s you know, looks a certain way, then you can talk about that. That’s content, you can say, Hey, I just had a really unfortunate thing happened to me. And it sort of bummed me out. And here’s what’s going on. And boy, every woman on the planet would relate to that story. Right?

Gogo Bethke 52:58
Exactly. And I feel like you know, we talked about 2019. Gosh, we almost in 2020. And the fact that I’m supposed to hide my body, because that makes me look smarter. I can’t believe you’re having the conversation in the end of 2019. I’m like, Are you kidding me right now? Really like my education and brain capacity. And everything that I bring to the table now is suddenly washed away? Because I have boobs?

D.J. Paris 53:20
Yeah, it’s funny. I think a lot of people think that women who look a certain way might have it easier because they look a certain way. And the truth is, in some cases, in some ways, it’s because

Gogo Bethke 53:30
they assume that I’m because I’m blind and I have the herbs. And because sometimes they are out there. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you can follow me they’re not out there. You know, I mean, but I might have a lower cleavage or something where you can actually see that I’m a woman, God forbid, it’s not a turtleneck. You know, I mean, and I feel like in some cases, some people just assume if you’re blonde and good looking that you must be a bimbo. Like you can’t be smart, too at the same time, somehow one cancels out the other.

D.J. Paris 53:58
Yeah, and that probably forced you to work harder as well, because you had more to prove you were like, I am more than my looks. And it made it a little bit harder. And as a result, the perseverance is there. You’re like, No, I am going to make it and obviously you have and yes, you are not selling sex appeal. Right? That’s really important for the listeners to realize is this that’s not what gogo does. And it’s it’s apparent if you follow her that she doesn’t do that. But yes, of course, you know, you have to be very conscious of, you know, especially in social media, as it is gogo said at the beginning, you know, is this what audience is this for? What do they respond to,

Gogo Bethke 54:36
but I think that’s why video in my case, it’s so important because if all I did was, let’s say photos, and no video to come along with it, they may not be able to tell that I actually have a brain. You know, I mean, so if it’s just photos that you do, then you might come across as you you know, they might just assume certain things about you that it might not be true. And by doing videos and then not only see your looks but they also get an insight so they don’t only Getting the book by the cover, they actually able to read the content. And I think it’s really important if you take the social media out to show your brain, not just your looks.

D.J. Paris 55:09
Well, I think this is a good place to really talk about gogos boot camp, which by the way, everyone should be checking out Go Go’s boot camp.com. This is a social media program, it’s dozens of hours, when you factor in all of the extra freebies, it’s literally a step by step process, from A to Z, where realtors can figure out how to create, manage, and and, you know, consistently give great social media output to actually increase their fan base, and the people that follow them and eventually get more deals, and you need to have a structure, you shouldn’t just try to wing it. But here’s what I love the most about gogos bootcamp.com. And I haven’t yet got a chance to go through the program, I’m very excited myself to do it, because I need help with even our podcast getting it out there more than it is. And what I love about it is and it is you know, there’s a cost to it, just like there’s a cost to anything valuable. But here’s what I love 100% guarantee. And the reason for that is gogo is very confident that you will not need to exercise that 100% guarantee because the content is so strong. So for everyone who goes to the website and thinks, Well, you know, if I paid that, and it’s not good. Well, if it’s not good, you get your money back, but that’s not going to happen. So everyone needs to go to Go Go’s bootcamp. But can we talk a little bit about what people receive when they sign up?

Gogo Bethke 56:23
Sure, sure, absolutely. So originally started out I mean, I have clients now when I started at when he was 49 hours a series. So we started out with three series and each series got released. Originally, the very first series is about social media, they it has a ton of different videos, probably 10 different videos of explaining the basics of social and what you should and should not do, and how to use all of the features of social media. And then the second part is operation. So what it takes to work in your business, so anything from creating a CMA, what do I take the listing appointments, what are my closing gifts, everything CRM programs, how to use them, smartphone numbers, things like that. And then the last one is eventually get to a point in your career where you want to remove yourself and you want your business to function without you. And that is systems and how to when to hire an assistant how to pay an assistant how to structure that CPAs CPAs, financial advisors, anybody that legal advice, anybody that you need to run a business, because eventually it’s not just you anymore, you know, you need all of those outside third parties to make sure that the money that you make is invested properly, and you’re paying your taxes properly and not paying too much, and all that stuff. And then this assessment, you know, you realize you’re a certain way, and the people that you want to work with naturally you are drawn to the people who are just like you, if they are just like you do, you should not hire them, because that’s not who you need. The reason you need somebody is because you don’t want to do certain things or you’re not good at doing certain things. And so you have to hire somebody who’s not like you at all. So that’s where this assessment comes in. So it’s pretty much just explaining business from start to finish, how everything happens here and Google’s real estate and then how they can take their businesses to that point. And if they are already there, then maybe I can just add certain things to that. That will help them with the whole social media aspect of it. There’s so many Rockstar realtors out there that do hundreds of millions of dollars but have zero social media presence. And when it comes to the millennials soon if you don’t exist on social media, you don’t exist to a millennial, they are not going to call you they don’t want to talk to you they will maybe DM you and asked you know they text you best case scenario where they will not hold the phone call with you. And if you think about it, that’s our one of our largest population that is going to buy now their first home and soon upsize and so you need to be in front of them. And then we also have what’s called the workshop. So the workshop is Margie and myself. We do what we did, I should say a 10 week series. And each is about an hour. So the whole bootcamp it’s probably over 20 hours of videos. And each week we just covered a different subject in different parts of the being realtor. And that’s the workshops I’m trying to go to the list. So the first week was branding, and pretty much how to brand yourself and you know read name recognition, brand recognition, photos, videographers, all that stuff. Second week was social media then CRM program and database management, buyer’s agent strategies, Listing Agent strategies, Open House strategies working on your business, hiring the perfect assistant how to build a team and building residual income. And so it’s pretty much each of these are an hour class that we shot in our brokerage and they get access to that.

D.J. Paris 59:30
Yeah, so guys, again, check really in all you need to do is go to Go Go’s boot camp.com Watch the videos, read the copy, read the website, read everything, see if that’s what you need, because I know I am going through it myself, because it is what and I’m not a Producing Realtor, but I’m going to use those same strategies to help promote our own business and the podcast. So it’s it’s something that no matter how proficient you think you are, here’s somebody who’s actually having tremendous SAS, and you know, gosh, I would pay a fortune for that information. And people, you know, people are, thankfully it doesn’t cost a fortune, it’s actually quite cheap. For for what you get, I mean

Gogo Bethke 1:00:11
to say it’s 497 right now and we are coming out to sometime in November. We are coming out with Google’s bootcamp 2.0. The reason why is because this class is about a year old now. And Instagram has changed their algorithm a couple of times since. So there’s a few things that I need to update. And also, because in the first time when I did it, because social media comes so easy to me, I don’t know what you don’t know. So I am explaining it at a level that might be too high for some people who are brand new to it. So the 2.0 will literally walk you through like step by step how to post an IG TV video, how to tag a person how to tag location, why, to tag that. So literally step by step I’m screen, I’m sharing my phone screen and walking you through all of the different buttons, and these platforms to make sure that you’re doing it properly. So that’s 2.0. Also another series getting added to it. It’s called the mindset series, it’s over 50 videos, I realized that a large percentage of your success is your mindset and the belief of what you believe of yourself what you’re capable of doing and what you can imagine yourself doing down the road. And so there’s a few life lessons that I learned in my life. And I want to share that with everyone because I feel like if they could learn from my life lessons, then hopefully they don’t have to learn it the hard way. And so that is going to add it to be added as well. And then when the two new series come out, then the price will go up. But everybody that purchased it in the past, if they get it at 497, then they are just automatically going to get everything added for free.

D.J. Paris 1:01:35
Or that that’s that’s wonderful. So basically guys, just to recap, if you buy it, now you’re going to get the future updates. And there’s there are a tremendous amount of updates coming a 50 videos just for attitude and mindset. The bug gogos bootcamp 2.0 videos are going to be redone with updated information about how to use the social media platforms and even at a more remedial level. If you’re like, you know, I don’t know how to tag people, I don’t really understand even the basics, she’ll have it covered. So now’s the time to get in so that you get those updates for free. Thank you great well, and by the way, I am going to try to convince gogo to come on here more often, because I think this can be a regular series on our show. So I’m gonna do my best to persuade her to do that. But we are so grateful that you took the time to even do this episode. So go go, I think this is a perfect place to talk. We went almost a full hour and there’s so much more to cover. So we’d love to have you back in the future. So everyone who’s listening, go to gogos boot camp.com Buy the program, what do you have to lose, it’s a money, there’s a money back guarantee. To me, I love things that have very few things in life of a money back guarantee. And especially when you’re paying that, you know, a sizable amount of money, which I don’t think this is sizable, but for some people it will be this is a no risk situation. So I couldn’t recommend it more. She knows her stuff, she gets results. And she’s been doing it for the last, you know, gosh, I don’t 15 years really in real estate. And now she has a team of 106 agents. Her network now is 106 agents nationwide, at her at her office and as a recruiter, I know how difficult even that is to do. So this is somebody that you want to follow because she gets things done, and she does it the right way. So go go. Thank you so much for being on our show.

Gogo Bethke 1:03:23
Thank you so much for having me. You’re awesome. And I did the math while you were talking. So the 45 million and I sold with everything that I learned on social media generate over $1.3 million in commissions. So I would spend 500 To make 1.3 If it was me. But I’m not saying they will make 1.3 I’m saying that if they implement everything, there is a very easy way to double their income of what everything they’re doing already.

D.J. Paris 1:03:47
Well guys, you just heard it here. And this is an important thing, you could legitimately Double Your Income simply by by purchasing this course. And again, you have nothing to lose, it’s a no brainer. So anyway, we’re so grateful that you came on the show. Again, thank you for spending the time that I know you don’t have that you’re willing to do just for our audience. And I love that thank you so much and we’re gonna have you on again so guys go to Go Go’s go to gogos boot camp.com and go go and I will hopefully see you in a future episode. By the way before we go, everyone follow us on Facebook and I’m going to start an Instagram account based on what I’m learning gogos boot camp, but for our Facebook for now go to facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod, which is where every single day we post an article that we find online that we think is actionable, something you can do immediately to grow your business. Obviously we post the links to all of our episodes including this one that will be that will be coming shortly as well as all of our previous episodes and we also do a weekly one minute video which I should also put on Instagram, but I don’t for now it’s on Facebook, which is just a quick little tip are one of our producers does that and she’s wonderful. Her name In this list so guys, follow us on Facebook facebook.com forward slash keeping it real powder. Just search for keeping it real podcast. Also, you can go to our website and listen to every episode we’ve ever done, stream it live from our site, keeping it real pod.com and also a follow find us on iTunes, Google Play Anywhere you are using an app to listen to podcasts, just search for keeping a real podcast, we pop right up and subscribe. And lastly, tell a friend, that’s the best way you can support this podcast is tell more brokers, realtors agents that could benefit from hearing from people like go go about our show and really appreciate it just if you tell if everyone tells one person. Well, we’ll double our audience. So please continue to do that. And go go thank you again, and we’ll let you get back to your busy social media empire.

Gogo Bethke 1:05:46
Thank you. Thank you so much. And if I may, can you guys also follow me on Google’s real estate on all platforms?

D.J. Paris 1:05:52
Yes. So find her on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter everywhere guys, Go Go’s real estate. Just do a search for it. And we’re gonna post the links to all of that too. In on this in the description here of this podcast episodes. If you don’t know where to go, just look at the notes from the podcast episode. They’ll all be right there for you. So go go. Thank you so much.

Gogo Bethke 1:06:11
Thank you guys. Thank you have a wonderful week.