Can realtors use YouTube as a source of buyer and seller leads? YES! Jackson Wilkey, one half of Portland and Seattle’s famous YouTube Agents is living proof that prospecting on YouTube works! In the past four months they’ve closed 12 million in production ALL from YouTube. They’re on pace to close 100 sales transactions in 2020. In this interview Jackson shares his YouTube secrets that anyone can do to drive more qualified leads right to you!
The YouTube Agents have a course for brokers to learn this process. Click here to check it out!
Use promo code “DJ” for a special discount!
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast in the country made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your host, and guide through the show. And in just a moment, we’re gonna bring on the YouTube agents who get 100% of their business through YouTube. And they’re crushing it. I’m super excited. They’re from Portland. That’s a good time to mention that this show is now nationwide we’ve always had nationwide listeners. But now we’re getting nationwide guests. So if you know someone in your market that we need to feature on our show a top producer doing unique things that people need to know about, then you please let us know you can always visit us at our website to contact us which is keeping it real pod.com Of course we have every episode we’ve ever produced streaming on that website. And of course, you can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play Spotify, Pandora, anywhere you listen to podcast, just search for keeping it real look for the one that has the name DJ, that’s me. And because there’s a few others with the same name, but you’ll find us pretty easily and guys, also, please tell a friend, we are committed to doubling the number of episodes that we did last year this year. So we’re going to do that but we need your help. We want to double our listenership. All I’m asking you to do is think of one person, one real estate agent that could benefit from hearing the secrets of top producers and pass this over to him you’ll be doing this a huge, huge favor. And thank you very much in advance for that. And lastly, guys, follow us on Facebook. So that’s facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pot every single day we post an article that we find online that is designed to help you grow your business. That’s pretty much all we post along with updates to all of our new episodes. So our whole intention is to help you take your business to the next level by talking to people who are already at that next level. So thanks again for your continued listenership. Thanks for telling a friend and oh one last thing. I keep asking for things, saying it’s the last thing but this is literally the last thing. Please rate us if your specifically whatever system you’re using to listen to our show, whether it’s iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, etc. Please do us a favor and rate us the more ratings you do the better we show up in the search results and the more people we can help. So thanks again guys. And now onto our episode with the YouTube agents.
Today on the show, we have Jackson Wilkie one half of the YouTube agents from next home Realty connection in Portland, Oregon. Now Jackson and his partner Jesse have successfully cracked the code of building a massive real estate business through YouTube. With our obsession with the SEO video and all of their in depth knowledge of YouTube related topics. What they’ve been able to do is transition a successful traditional real estate business into a YouTube lead machine, where 90% of their business is now coming through YouTube, which is unbelievable. They are on track to close 100 transactions from YouTube alone this year. And I also want to give them another shout out because in the last four months, I believe they closed 12 million in production, mostly from YouTube. You got to check out their YouTube channel, which is called YouTube agents. And they have a course that they want to teach you about how to use YouTube and you can go to the YouTube agents.com. And we do have a promo code put in the promo code DJ and you’ll get a certain percentage off. But anyway, welcome Jackson to the show.
Jackson Wilkey 4:43
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. I’m pumped to talk about this.
D.J. Paris 4:47
I am so pumped because this is not an exaggeration. You are the first realtor first to realtors, you and your partner that I think are actually doing the most important thing with respect to staying in touch with The public, which is providing actual content that people care about and need, instead of just going, Hey, I’m gonna post a Facebook ad. And here’s my new listing. How cool is this? Like, nobody cares, right? But if I’m moving to Portland, I’m gonna find your videos, because they’re all about what I need to know before I moved to Portland, and what neighborhoods and it’s so brilliant. And of course, I’m going to reach out to you guys, because you’re the ones providing all that great content anyway, I’m getting way ahead of ourselves. Tell me about tell me about you. How did you how did you get into real estate?
Jackson Wilkey 5:30
So pretty funny, I actually and this is the kicker, I just moved to Portland two years ago. So I don’t know anybody. Nothing. I came here from a little town in northern Idaho, to get to the big city came for a sales job. And it was actually had a friend or my wife had a friend whose husband worked in the escrow business. So I got on as a sales rep for an escrow company. Basically, everybody knows that title. Rep. And sure, I had no idea what the hell I was doing, because I just came from a, you know, a blue collar town where I was building power lines. And so Anyways, enough of that I got into sales at this escrow company and learn quickly that Realtors really wanted value. You know, that’s what we hear all the time. So I started figuring out that, like, video was this thing that all realtors wanted. And so I just kind of got super in depth of learning it, editing, shooting it, all of that stuff. And after literally 10 to 11 months, I was like, What the hell am I doing? Like, I’m on the wrong side of this, I feel that I could, you know, really leverages myself to get business. And then also I met Jesse, my business partner. He’s a very traditional style realtor who in his first year did like 12,000,011 point 5 million. Wow, traditional cold calling, boss, right? So anyways, we kind of hit it off, he really wanted to bring this like marketing and video to his business. And I was like, screw on jumping over. So we kind of like, teamed up, kind of per se, I got into real estate. And I’m like, I’m just gonna crush it. I know it. Well, I found out literally the first four or five months like this is hard as hell. Yeah. And so I was doing cold calling because he was so good at it. It was like easy for him. For me. It’s the hardest thing in the world. Like, I can’t ask for business. I can literally go anywhere. And I’m going to stand out and people will know me. But I couldn’t call call couldn’t do or not couldn’t do that kind of stuff. So I was really leveraging video. That’s how I got into real estate. I don’t know if you want me to keep going. But like, yeah, no, I love the story. Yeah, so because the story is kind of what got us to where we are today in a very quick timeframe. So like, literally, I’m getting to a point to where like, I’m gonna work myself back into working a real job. And, you know, it’s pretty stressful. But I’m like, I got to start leveraging this video. So here’s what’s really important. Everybody knows who Gary Vee is. And he always talks about being the digital mayor of your town. And so doing these interviews and restaurants and shops, and we started doing this really, really hardcore, like going to all these bars, restaurants doing the interviews and the town, the business owners, they all loved it. We put it to Instagram, we put it to Facebook everywhere, man, and it was killer. But we never got one phone call from it, dude. So I’m like, What the hell? Like, none of this works, man. What do so now I’m like, Okay, it’s real crushed. I need to figure out like I love video, this is how I’m going to get business or I’m going to get out of real estate. And I got down this just absolute rabbit hole wormhole of SEO, search engine optimization or, and leveraging the second largest search engine in the entire world. YouTube, YouTube. Sure. Yeah. So that’s really how it started. And then I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So there was a lot of trial and error. But now we’ve got we got the systems Absolutely. Dial.
D.J. Paris 9:03
Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about the kind of content you guys provide. Because for our listeners, who are mostly real estate agents, yeah, brokers, realtors, you know, every state calls a realtor is a little bit of a different term, but, but we have realtors, and essentially what what you guys have done is what I’ve been preaching. We have 650 Realtors at our company. And I tell all of them to do this. Nobody does that, of course. But this is really important because essentially what Jackson did, and he talks about cracking the code, and there’s a lot to this. It’s not He wasn’t just, you know, throwing darts in the dark. But essentially, he started you know, you can also think of it logically too. It’s like, what’s the kind of content that somebody who’s moving who is going to be transacting in real estate, especially if they’re moving to Portland or within Portland? What are some of the videos they might be seeking out prior to them buying or selling right? And so that’s what that’s what Jackson’s did and Jesse and they now have a huge treasure and library of this content, where it’s like, we’re the best neighborhoods. Hey, here’s some things you need to know before you move to Portland. So they created all this unbelievably smart and good content because it doesn’t, you can’t just put the content out there if it right up high quality because someone else will outrank you, based on you know, how long people watch and all of those those metrics. But basically, you guys probably just sat down at a whiteboard and said, What are the topics that people need to know when they’re thinking about moving either to Portland or within Portland? And then you started creating great content? Right?
Jackson Wilkey 10:35
Right. So there’s a lot there. So what real estate agents traditionally do is usually Gary Vee was very, I reference him a lot. He’s definitely a motivator, but talked about like 90% of people who like on on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, put out selfish content, like does that help?
D.J. Paris 10:52
Yeah, we were just, we were joking. We were just joking about this offline. It’s like, yeah, hey, you know what, what Realtors do because it’s easy, is they’ll post a link to their newest listing and say, Hey, guys, I have this listing for sale. And that’s great. And that’s fine. But it’s not really providing value to the 99% of the people that follow you who actually aren’t in the middle of, you know, wanting to buy or sell a home. It’s nice, and it makes something hey, he’s doing well, that’s great. But it doesn’t really provide them any value.
Jackson Wilkey 11:17
Well, here’s the number one thing it was never searched. So that’s, that’s the true and that’s, that’s the difference. And so, it I always reference it. It’s like on Facebook, when you look at like you’re scrolling through your feed and your friends sitting there and he’s at the Subaru dealer every single day talking about come down and buy a Subaru from me like you just go right past it. So real estate agents, not not because it’s easy. They just don’t know better. Like they see agents posting their open houses and listings, and maybe their principal brokers are older, and they’re telling them to do these things. And so that’s what you see. But they’re always starting with the verbiage of look at me in my open house and look at me and my listing. And none of this assertion, it kind of comes off as like selfish. And yes, I think if you wrap your head around, like, you know, the value proposition. So what we did was Yes, I got absolutely obsessed. I’m like, holy, I don’t know if you cuss on here, but like, Sure, whoa, holy shit, I figured out there was I have the documents still on my screen on my computer. I found 13,200 searches every single month that had no competition. And that was 27 video titles. And I’m like, holy crap, now I’m cracking into something here. So I started just writing video titles down and then clicking on them. And what I’ll use this is, you know, anybody listening, you can download Keywords Everywhere. It’s a Chrome extension that used to be free when I started. Now, it’s $10. And you get 100,000 keywords. So literally, you can search for months and months and months, every day, you will not run out of your keywords. So 10 bucks is the most worst thing in the world. So what it does, sure, it attaches itself to your I use Chrome. So it attaches itself to Chrome as an extension. Anytime you search anything on Google or YouTube, it’s going to tell you how many times that is searched. what it costs to pay for that, that longtail keyword or that keyword and the competition. So what you do is you just start typing in random things, and you need to wrap your brain around. You really need to wrap your brain around what people are searching for. This is an absolute search engine. People want answers to their questions. So I found out like, hey, people, when they’re moving to my city, they want to know how much it costs. So the cost of living in Portland, Oregon, well, that was searched almost 6000 times a month. And guess how much competition zero. So now I rank for that video, I have the number one video that gets 130 130 to 300 views every single day now just cracked. You know, we’re close to 20,000 views on that video alone. And guess what? I shot it with my cell phone, edit it for on iMovie for free. So yeah, man, it’s it. That was the game changer right there.
D.J. Paris 13:57
Yeah, this is really important because as marketers or as realtors, we’re constantly thinking about how do we get in front of our clients? And more importantly, we often think how do we show up number one on Google, right? Well, for a realtor that’s really hard to do. You’re competing against for and when we talk about showing up number one on Google, we’re talking about showing up for phrases, wherever whatever your specialty is, right maybe you specialize in a particular neighborhood in your in your in your town or your city and you want to show up number one for Best Realtor in Lincoln Park or somewhere in Portland, right? But the problem is, you’re competing against a ton of other players in that space. Right? You’ve got Zillow. You’ve got Redfin, you’ve got, of course, all the brokerage firms that also want that lead. Right. So we’re talking about Google searches. Well, it’s really, really hard to rank organically in the top three slots. In on Google just really difficult. It costs a tremendous amount of money even to earn your way up there. You can certainly buy your way up there with ads, but it’s really difficult to actually earn a natural spot there. However, the most forgotten about a search engine for this type of business is really YouTube, right? So people are still searching for those exact same phrases and keywords on, as Jackson said, the second largest search engine online, which of course is YouTube. And as Jackson said, there were no other players in his space for those those key phrases.
Jackson Wilkey 15:20
Yep. And that is exactly right. So when you look at it, like Google, and blogs, there’s billions and billions and billions of blogs or blogs, and it is so hard to compete. It’s basically impossible. So that was what we did is, is I started looking into YouTube, which, if you don’t know it, Google owns YouTube. So it’s literally the same search engine. In fact, you would be surprised how many people reach out to us or when they’re here for tours. And we always ask, you know, like, how did you find us? We know it’s through YouTube or through video, but which one? Or how, in a lot of our like, actually, I was just searching on YouTube, like, you know, neighborhoods in Portland, or cost of living in Portland, in your videos actually popped up first. And so I clicked on him. And then I’m like, holy crap. And I literally went down this rabbit hole of watching all your videos, which are really great, by the way. Thanks for doing that, sir. Yeah, do you like Google even understands that there’s too many blogs. And Google understands that everybody’s watching video. And so they’re starting to pull videos over into their platform. But once we realize that, like, like, people are wanting to really figure out what it’s like to live there. And it’s a stressful situation. Nobody really just like plans their move for two or three years. And it’s graceful. Usually, it’s like a job move or relocation or something happens in like, Okay, I’m moving. That’s two years ago. That’s what happened to me. And guess what, what do you do? And I started researching a bunch, where to look for family? You know, I got three kids. So I gotta figure out where the schools are. You got to figure out what’s the best place to live. And guess what, when you look at it on a map or read a blog, it just doesn’t give you what it feels like. And so that was really when things changed for us is when we actually started figuring out what people were asking about living in our territory. And then we covered it with those videos. How does the traffic Well, me and Justin went and got stuck in traffic and showed you how bad the traffic was or how to avoid it. You got, you got family, we talked about the top 10 neighborhoods for families, you’re a single we did the best neighborhoods for single. So we really just capitalized on on the search engine on search engine optimization, figuring out what people were searching, and doing exactly that title, that longtail keyword in YouTube and ranking very quickly for it.
D.J. Paris 17:34
Yeah, it’s brilliant. I was it was funny, we are recorded got a little screwy. So we’re gonna, just sorry, Jackson is actually covering something we covered, but you guys won’t won’t know that. So I’m going to tell the story again. So I apologize, Jackson, but it’s a good story. And this is really important. So I was on a trip to Ireland with with my father earlier last year. And we were going from town to town. And as you do when you go to Ireland, and of course, there’s so many towns, and there’s so many things to go see and do. And there’s a million pubs. And there’s just there’s so many restaurants and places to stay. And it is super overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to cram in, you know the number of places that my dad and I did. And so what we ended up doing is every day we’d look at our our book that we had about touring Ireland, and we would go to the specific city and see what all the sites were. But then sometimes that didn’t even give us a really good sense of like, what we should actually go see you have to really trust the author of that book. And the author was good, but wasn’t always right. And so what we ended up doing after about the third day, we realized, you know, we really need to check out some of these things ahead of time. Right. So we went on YouTube for these and we would start searching for Okay, top 10 things to do and Dingell or whatever town we were in Kilkenny or wherever. And then we would actually see because people would do a tour of different sites, it would say, Hey, that looks pretty cool. Or maybe that one. And we would do that. And even sometimes we would just listen to the audio as well if we were driving and couldn’t watch the video at the same time. But the but the point I’m making is that even though I had searched online, I had read all the blogs and there’s a million blogs about touring being a tourist in Ireland. And I saw a lot of pictures and I got a general sense the videos really clinched and and after three days, we just abandon everything and watch videos. And so we were this is a perfect example. And there believe it or not even for Ireland, which is one of the most touristic company countries in the whole world. There weren’t that many options, believe it or not. So. So this is exactly what Jackson’s talking about.
Jackson Wilkey 19:27
And I’m you know, I’ll mention it again, if I can’t remember the beginning of from our recording thing, but like I’ve actually worked myself out of real estate in less than a year. And I want to make that a point because real estate really wasn’t my thing Jesse’s like the greatest real estate agent ever. But in Listen, in basically six months, I’ve figured out how to leverage a platform where there’s 2 billion people on it and figured out that you know what, even though there’s billions of videos on There, there’s really nothing about your city. Like that’s really informative. And maybe it comes from somebody who just lives there and happens to do a random video in their apartment, right? So to get out into your community, and this is when it really changed for us is when we started vlogging with a GoPro Hero seven, like, it’s a $40 camera, it’s the greatest camera of all time. And we literally just hit the ground running and started just showing you what these neighborhoods were showed you with downtown Portland was we bought a drone, which if you don’t have one, there’s a million photographers out there who have them, and they’ll sell you pictures or give them to you, if you give them credit, which started putting the drone in the air and showing you like, Hey, look at this neighborhood. And we would get up in the air, talk about the main streets. And then we walked down the main one, here’s all your restaurants, shops, bars, your walking distance of ease your 15 minutes, you can actually see down the road, you can see the towers of or the buildings for downtown, you’re 15 minutes away. So if you’re going to be working, yada, yada, so we really started figuring out what people were searching. And found out, there’s really no good content on YouTube about our city. And we went from getting a viewer day three views a day to now we get sometimes 1500. So that’s in, you know, six months, basically 10 months since our first video, hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of views. And now we’re the number one most suggested channel. And that’s what’s important. So if you type in anything, Portland, Oregon, and you don’t happen to catch one of our videos, which is rare, you’ll watch one and at the end of it, they’re going to suggest our video. So we get a lot of views from the suggested platform. And people are watching us like sitcoms, because when you are moving or you’re traveling to Ireland or whatever, that’s a real like right now situation. And you want to just engulf your brain with as much information as possible. And so they go down these rabbit holes of watching our videos for hours and hours. And guess what? Every phone call that I get? Imagine this. Every phone call we get is somebody that’s just like me that likes the things I like that likes my personality. Yeah, we get the hater comments all the time. But I don’t want to work with them. I get people I mentioned brewskis all the time. I love beers. And I’m always like, this is my favorite join my family and I just went here last weekend, we got some brewskis. So people call me like dude, Jackson, we’re coming up by the house, hey, when we come for a tour, we’re buying a brewskis these people are my people, like I’m friends with these people immediately. And I’ve never met them. And here’s the funny thing. We do so many tours now. And again, I’ve worked myself out of this. I literally just do YouTube videos every day because we branched over to Seattle, Washington, because again, nobody’s doing that. And when I was doing the tours and stuff, I would be like, oh shit, like, I don’t know what these people look like. So I would park and I’d kind of like just look around and I would look at whoever it was. And they’re like waving their hands.
D.J. Paris 22:53
They know you are of course.
Jackson Wilkey 22:55
Oh my god, Jackson, it’s you like that must be them. So it’s a really good feeling. And yeah, there’s there is. It’s really tough. It’s not easy. I don’t I don’t want to say that. But there is no competition. If done correctly and optimized in SEO, holy crap, it can literally change your life. Change your business. It really quick. Yeah, and
D.J. Paris 23:14
it’s a marathon, right? It’s definitely not. You put up one video, maybe you get lucky. Probably won’t. It’s kind of like this podcast. So I started it. I thought, boy, if I was I’m not a Producing Realtor, either. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool, because we have so many Realtors here in Chicago. I said, if I was producing, I would want to know what the top 1% is doing to grow their business. And so I thought, you know, I know the realtors that our firm, would we have some of those people, of course, but not all of them. I know, they would want to know. And then I started interviewing, I said, I wonder if those top 1% Realtors would be willing to talk to me. And of course, they were thrilled to do it. Because it’s a way of giving back as well. And even producing these videos, whether or not you get leads from it, you’re giving back to the community. And you’re giving back to people in a way that’s really, really valuable. Now, of course, you want to do it to generate business ultimately. But if you go into it from I’m going to create the best possible content for my audience, even though my audience doesn’t even know me yet. And you just put your head down and keep doing it and learn. There’s there’s obviously a lot of technique there. But at the end of the day, the content wins over everything. And so we started doing this podcast for that exact same reason you’re doing it and and I don’t even promote the firm I work at because when I’m interviewing brokers from other firms, they probably don’t want me doing that. So I never have and sure enough, just as you were saying, people find you people have found me going, I’m hooked on the show. I love the content you provide, hey, what’s going on at your firm, right? And that’s where I get so we have a very similar idea what I’m not doing however, and you’re getting such a great idea is utilizing YouTube. So I write a lot of content, I write blogs, I write for magazines, I do a lot of those things, but I don’t make the videos and so what you’re doing is creating so for everyone listening that There’s a lot that you can take away from this right? So start thinking about what’s your specialty, that’s really the most important thing is, what geographic area? Do you specialize it? And if it’s a particular neighborhood, depending on how big your city is, or if it’s a suburb, or if it’s the city itself or whatever, figure out what gets you the most excited what you like what you know the most about, and then don’t always just talk about real estate, right, figure out what kind of content that people are thinking about moving into this area? What would they need to know? What are they interested in? Yes, of course, real estate is part of it. But like, they probably want to know, all what this what schools are going on here and, and what the local cuisine is like, and also what bars brewskis are available. Right?
Jackson Wilkey 25:40
Exactly. And you add on that real quick, like, you need to work to your avatar to and you need to work with people that you know, you think are going to be buying houses. And ultimately, and I don’t want to say this in a negative way, but like who have the money and resources to buy houses. And so we kind of cater to that. And that’s something that you will really test and as a blog writer, you probably find out like, oh, this title works Oh, in this area, right? So we have these video titles that really work well. And when I started really talking about at first I was kind of nervous to tell people I wasn’t from Portland, I just kind of came as like, you know, important real estate shares and doing these videos and then I’m like, Man, whenever I tell a story, you know of my like something that I did or Jesse tell the story like that watch time is longer, the video performs better. And so I did a video like, you know, moving to Portland, Oregon, my story and I literally just talked and it’s just a headshot stop video green screen video about when I moved here. The struggles, you know, daycare. There’s so many families that daycares were so backed up. So please, please, please set up your daycare before you come that caught me off guard. And yeah, so I worked towards these avatar and when you said schools that really hit because, you know we have hundreds and hundreds of reach outs and so like literally 8070 80% of them people are coming. They either have a job already or you know, most of them already got the job already and they need to find schools like here’s the here’s the one thing I want to get across to that it’s just kind of popped up before for forget. So they’re looking for schools, right? They haven’t even searched three bedroom, two bath house, four bedroom, three bathroom house. We are literally catching these people before they get into Zillow and Redfin. We are so like at the top of the funnel, these people don’t know what house they want, yet all they know. They’re all they want to know is where to be living. And then the house comes second. So as everybody gets scared of Zillow and Redfin, and all these big, big neighbors, like, we’re getting ahead of them. And so these people were like, well, I don’t really know the house I want yet, you know, I guess we’d like you know, three bed, we want a yard, you know, we’d like a little bit of space, you know, whatever. So they go through it then, but they hadn’t thought about it. You know what I mean? That’s pretty powerful. So then when we sit there and go, perfect. These are probably like the top three areas that we really recommend. And they usually say, Yeah, we like this area in that area, too. We’re like, okay, so when you come, we’re going to set up your tour date, and we’re going to show you those, but we’re going to take you to the areas we think I’ll fit you in like 90% of the time the two areas they pick or like they’re like, No, I couldn’t live there. We’re like we knew that. So here, we’re going to take you where we think fits in there, like, Oh, this is the best. So we know it. We set that up. But then, you know, we give them a freaking custom property search in our CRM, and they think it’s the greatest thing ever. You can do that. Like Sure, yeah. It really easily. And so, yes, you talk about value and content, like these people are just wanting to know what it’s like to live there. And then they will literally use you for everything, everything else. They use our preferred preferred lender, they use our agents in their state, like we literally just take over this whole situation because they trust us more than anybody with their move.
D.J. Paris 28:56
Well, yeah. And you just brought up a good point. And this is really important too, because of course YouTube is global. And people from Portland are not the only people who are searching for this content, they find it somehow and all of a sudden they’re like actually I’m moving to you know Santa Barbara and you’re like Hey, no problem. We have a partner there I can find the best realtor there and get that over to you. And then oh by the way, that’s a referral fee to you. So this is a huge referral machine. So when you said you you talk your way out of real estate, you’re really not kidding what you’ve become is a lead generation machine of course, and that’s free every broker once you did it for the brilliant says you did it before they ever met you. That’s brilliant. They haven’t met you in person but they already know you because they like your content because it’s good. And it’s and it’s available and they can find it and it’s you know better than anyone elses for that particular though
Jackson Wilkey 29:46
certainly everything people have taught you about providing value and making these people trust you like you know you but actually like this is how you do it. This is exactly how you can do it. Very quick and it there is no more powerful platform and YouTube is only growing. Like I said, Google is putting way more videos on their platform. YouTube is sponsoring it was sponsoring the Major League, playoffs, everything like YouTube is growing at a rapid rate. And it is a incredible search engine that is just wide open in our space. So we love teaching it. And people always ask, like, why are you giving all these tips like my YouTube agent channel, it’s literally the YouTube agents. I give so many tips in there because one that just opens up more doors for me if you’re in Lansing, Michigan or something and you have somebody from Portland moving there, then you’re gonna reach out to me and say, Hey, someone’s moving from Beaverton, Oregon, can you take care of him? Yep, for sure. It just opens this, like, we want to build channel partners. And that’s how we really start searching. If, if we don’t have an agent in an area, we go to YouTube and search and see if we can find one. And usually we can’t, in fact, most of the time you can’t. So then we try and find somebody who’s really good social and can close these deals. But yeah, we’d love to build these channel partners out and, and connect.
D.J. Paris 31:05
So if you’re if you’re a broker who’s listing a realtor who’s listening, and you want to learn how to do this, and you should learn how to do this, because look, you know, you can always buy Zillow leads, you can buy Redfin leads, there’s a lot of places that will sell you lead leads, because there’s a lot of great lead generation companies. But what we’re really doing, or what Jesse Jackson are doing, and there’s nothing wrong, of course, with purchasing leads, that’s great. There are a lot of great services that do that. But what what we’re what we’re really doing is introducing the people you don’t yet know to you through really important content that they seek out, so that you’re not even pushing it their way going watch my video watch, but they’re finding you. So there’s a lot less resistance. If they liked the video, and they like you, then of course, hopefully they would reach out when they have a real estate transaction.
Jackson Wilkey 31:53
Yep, that’s what it is. And I mean, there’s a lot that goes into optimizing a video so that you can rank and just know if you do start. It’s a beast man, it takes a lot. I like I said, I built a new channel living in Seattle, Washington, and I don’t even live there. But it’s wide open. So I do a lot of screen screen videos. And then we’ll we’ll drive the hours up there to get some B roll footage. But holy crap, starting over again, I was like, This is so hard. I’m getting like one view a day or four views. And it took me four days to get another subscriber. So it it takes time. And that’s probably another reason why there’s nobody in this space. But if you can dedicate even just one, one video a week that is keyword research, and you did that, you know you’re talking 50 videos in one year, you’re gonna be ranking, you’re gonna have some videos at the top, and you’re gonna get phone calls for sure. So optimizing, you know, thumbnails, titles, tags, descriptions, there’s a lot to it. But man, I started from not knowing a damn thing to really perfecting it quickly. So it’s definitely doable.
D.J. Paris 32:57
Yeah, it’s funny. So when I started this podcast, we did it, I did it entirely for free, on top of my my full time job for about a year and a half. And occasionally we’d have a sponsor reach out to us and say, Hey, can we buy a spot as a live read on your show, with a little onesie twosie here and there, we never sought them out. And then all of a sudden, about three or four months ago, we had a national sponsor reach out to us on their own going, Hey, your show is getting a lot of attention. And we can see that you guys are probably getting a lot of downloads. And even though we were only focused on the Chicagoland area, we’re talking to brokers who are successful here. And they said, We want to buy 13 episodes, and they threw stupid money at us, and we had to take it. And so then all of a sudden, I went, Oh my gosh, this could this, this could be a business. It’s not a, you know, a huge business for us at this moment, because we’re really just focused on providing value. But now all of a sudden, we have lots of national sponsors that are reaching out and now every episode is sponsored. But it took I can’t even tell you the hundreds of hours I’ve put into this, over the last two years just focused on providing value good quality content, just like Jesse and Jackson do in Portland and now Seattle, their whole focus is on we want the best quality videos for the keywords and the and the questions that people are searching for on YouTube. And and then of course optimizing it, and that’s what they’ll teach you how to do. So I could not be a bigger fan of them. And let’s let’s promote your your, your your your course, as well. So it’s the YouTube agents.com. We’ll also have a link in of course, the notes and we’ll promote it also on our Facebook page. But there is a discount which we’re figuring out right now. But there will be a discounted put in the the code DJ. So just the letters D and J both capital my name, DJ and you’ll get a bit of a discount but to talk just a little bit about the course.
Jackson Wilkey 34:48
Yeah, so what I wanted to do and that’s the thing with real estate, there’s so many courses as you know, and I’ve gotten into a few and unfortunately there are ones about cold calling stuff so I didn’t really gain I think from it, but they were very long, there was hour, hour and a half videos. And I don’t think anybody’s attention can last that long for a long time. And then there’s like 12, like 12 sections at all. So I really broke it down into like three minute videos, the longest video I have, I think is like 10 minutes. And that’s really like diving into editing and stuff. So instead of buying like an editing course, and, you know, SEO course, in a YouTube course, I combined it all. So even if you don’t have a YouTube channel, like the opening section is creating your YouTube channel, show your channel art, all of your channel tags, what settings need to be set, so that this thing turns into an absolute mousetrap lead machine, and then it’s, Hey, let’s figure out all your titles. Let’s get 20 3040 video titles real fast. And then let’s let’s shoot these my first videos and when you talked about quality, that isn’t per se, like these flashy listing videos dry, it’s more like content. My top two videos are still ones I shot on my cell phone because I gave true true true answers cost of living and the pros and cons. And I told you my pros and cons and they dominate. So I literally these people typed in pros and cons of Portland, Oregon, which is searched a shitload and I did a title. And I told you five pros, five cons, five things in the middle. So like I gave them answer, and they stay throughout the whole thing. So quality is, you know, we’re getting a lot better now. But quality is it’s a search engine, you need to be answering questions. So if somebody asked you that question offhand, how could you answer it. So I teach you this in the course. And it’s like, really building your videos with the hook, the intro, the the meat, the call to actions, like, there are certain ways to do this to really grow fast. So it is literally a to z. And then when uploading is very important to optimize and rank even for tougher keywords. I know how to do that now. And it’s through optimization, where other videos other creators did not optimize using descriptions, titles, tags, all of that, and then creating the most clickable thumbnail. So there’s a lot to it, but it’s all broke down into little three, five minute course era videos, and a lot of them so you can reference back and it really, it’s one of a kind that if you look, there’s no Realtors doing this really anywhere. So it’s one of its kind. We’re really trailblazing this and man, don’t be the second third, fourth Realtor in your market to do this because it you will own your market if you can get out there. And if there’s somebody, I’ll teach you how to get above, Okay,
D.J. Paris 37:30
wonderful. Well, hey, I think that’s a great place to park and I think, you know, I would love to have to have you and even Jesse Of course, as well on the show on a regular basis, because these are, you know, we could do a lesson, you know, a month or at least something to consider, but I know our audience is going to eat this up. So even if this is our only time doing this, depending on how busy you guys are with the videos, you’re doing, man, good. But we definitely want to promote, again, go to the YouTube agents.com Check out their course, also, you know, they also provide content for you the realtor on their YouTube channel as well. So there’s that he provides a lot of content for free. So it’s not Yeah, and that’s really important because as we know, you know giving away quality and when I say quality content, I want to just go back for a moment just to make sure because you brought up a really good point Jackson, about the about the the quality, I didn’t mean the quality of the video being shiny and bright and beautiful and sharp and having really cool edits and all of that’s really cool and useful. But the quality of the content reigns supreme and I just mean answering the questions in an authentic way giving the most best content possible you know, and answering those is always going to win and then yeah, you’ll get better at editing just like you did right but and but you know what I want to do is have you guys on more regularly, but in the meantime everyone should go check out the YouTube agents.com and and just to let you get this are this Jackson has been in business less than two years in real estate moving to a new city, Portland and now also doing the same thing in Seattle, which he had never, you know, never lived in either. And now from from you know from Idaho out to Portland and now is on pace to close 100 transactions and then you know, within this year has done 12 million in the last six months, all from YouTube. Like that’s, that’s an it’s it’s crazy.
Jackson Wilkey 39:22
Yeah, I got this thing dialed man. So we branched out to Seattle. And I’m like, All right, I’m going to use everything, all my tips and tricks my knowledge. So it took us about three four months in Portland to really get reached out because I’d figured out and in Seattle in five weeks we had nine reach outs already and their median home price there’s like well over a million bucks so and we’re going to be doing lots a lot and we won’t close any of those. We actually have a team there that’s agreed to give us 50% of every commission back so nice. We will feel that every call we will get our team in in Seattle to we set up a zoom call and I’m just keep going but I will come back every month. I’ll come back every other week. Like hey, I’m so passionate about this stuff I forget Love it. And I teach a lot of it. But yeah, we do zoom calls. So these people call and the first thing we do is get them on a zoom call with our lender, with our buyer’s agent. You know, we had hired buyer’s agents. How great is this? She’s brand new, she’s never had to pick up the phone and call one person, she answers three to 10 calls every day. So she feels these calls, she sets up the Zoom calls, where we get face to face and half the time they’re so starstruck, you know, it’s just really funny. And then we plan out their trip there, you know, whatever we and then sometimes you get the homerun where you just write offers without them even come in, but we’re at the process absolutely dialed in if you know I’m always available to me and find me anywhere social message me, dude, I love it. I’ll will rap back and forth about it. So yeah, man, it’s wide open. There’s really no one doing it. And this is the way of as as a lot of big disruptors are out there. Hey, providing answers to really tough questions moving to your area is still number one.
D.J. Paris 40:59
Perfect, well, Jackson Wilkie from YouTube agents and also from next home Realty connection in Portland, and Seattle. And of course, really, from all over because you’re on YouTube. So we’re just
Jackson Wilkey 41:09
everywhere, you’re everywhere, I will mention one thing that I’m super proud of. And Jesse really took the reins on this, we started a Facebook pro group $49 a month and it’s just filled with agents. It’s growing like crazy, who want to grow channels from all over. So it’s not one of those groups where you post your video and get likes and subscribers like it’s not that it’s literally training, access to me. And it’s going to be a huge referral platform. So what you know, when it when these leads come up, it gets posted to the group, and whoever’s in those areas scoops up those leads. So it’s a killer, one of a kind, pro Facebook group, too. So that’s on the YouTube a team.com. Got it, you can sign up for that you can check it out. It’s the pro youtube for YouTube agents pro Facebook group, you can check it out. But you’ll have to sign in to the YouTube agents first to get in. But yeah, we’re everywhere. Awesome, guys.
D.J. Paris 41:57
So again, you the the YouTube agents.com Use promo code DJ for a discount. And I this is going to be so well received, we’re going to have you guys on on a regular basis. But there’s two things you can purchase. One is the full course. And that’s what the promo code discount. And the second one is the Facebook pro group which is getting direct access to Jackson and Jesse and all the other members to support each other get tips tricks on how to do these videos. Because, look, guys, I mean, technically, I did have a podcast before I started this one. But that was years ago, and I was just kind of screwing around. I learned how to do all this stuff on my own too. If you just focus like like Jax was like, do one video a week. And by the way, if you just turn your phone around and film yourself for the first several months doing those videos, as long as the the the content, the quality of the content is good, it’s good enough for now and then you can get better and better. But it’s if you do this I like I’m living proof of this Jackson’s living proof of this, you do this. And eventually if the if the quality of the content is good, eventually listeners in your case viewers show up. And then of course, sales are results as well. So thank you so much for being part of the show. We really appreciate I’m so glad that we connected and it’s this is awesome. So thank you on behalf of the listeners. I appreciate you guys Jackson and Jesse was was on for just a moment. We appreciate you guys being part of the show and sharing your knowledge with our audience. So thank you. Hey,
Jackson Wilkey 43:21
buddy. Yeah, let’s get back on there. Hit me up. I’ll come back on and if you get any questions, you know, in your comments, reviews or whatever. We’ll answer those on the next
D.J. Paris 43:29
one. Awesome. We’ll do thank you so much.
Jackson Wilkey 43:32
Yeah, you bet.
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