From Free Leads to PPC: Master Lead Generation Like a Pro

In this episode of the Ascend Your Success Podcast, host Wyatt Reed breaks down the essentials of lead generation for real estate investors. Whether you’re new to the game or looking to refine your strategy, this episode provides actionable insights on finding leads, working with free and paid lead sources, and avoiding common pitfalls. Wyatt shares his proven methods for connecting with motivated sellers through free resources like Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and for-sale-by-owner platforms. He also discusses paid strategies like postcards, cold calling, texting, and advanced options like PPC and PPL campaigns.

Consistency is key, and Wyatt emphasizes how to build sustainable marketing habits, track results, and scale your efforts over time. Packed with practical advice, this episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about growing their real estate investing business.

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Transcript

Wyatt Reed (00:01.058)
What's going on guys? My name is Wyatt Reid and this is the Ascend Your Success podcast and today I'm gonna be talking about a lead generation. What is lead generation? What is a lead in general? A lead is someone who's interested in selling you their property. They're somebody who's motivated by some way, shape, form, or fashion, whether they're going through a divorce, whether they can't make the payments anymore, whether somebody died and passed the property down to them.

It's somebody who is in any way, shape, form, or fashion interested in selling their property or at least getting an offer on their property. And when I say lead generation, it means how can I find these people? That's the number one thing that you need to be focused on. If you're getting into real estate investing or even thinking about getting into real estate investing, don't worry about the money. Don't worry about the LLC, the

the business cards, the logos, anything like that, you need to be focused, number one, first and foremost, on lead generation. And so with that in mind, let's talk about how do I even find leads? What are the best ways to find leads? And that really depends on your situation, your time frame, your budget. Are you living paycheck to paycheck? Do you have a couple hundred dollars to spend? Do you have a couple thousand dollars to spend? And here's something that I want you to know.

right up front. If you have a couple thousand to spend or if you have a couple hundred to spend, I would not just straight up spend money right up front because if you don't know how to talk to a seller or you don't even know what ARV is, then you're probably going to waste a lot of marketing dollars. So what I would suggest is number one, you start off with free lead sources. What are free lead sources? Things such as wholesalers,

or agents, for sale by owners, Craigslist. Spend an hour a day and get on Facebook Marketplace, get on Craigslist. I've bought two houses in the past couple years on Craigslist, which is crazy. But for sale by owners are on Zillow, they're on Facebook. Talk to local agents. If you make one Facebook post in one of these investor groups, you're gonna have about 150 agents.

Wyatt Reed (02:26.304)
message you, DM you, and try to get your business, right? But what you want to do is you want to find agents who work with investors, who are going to send you what you actually want versus what they, you know, just sending you everything, right? And so, and wholesalers, number one should be wholesalers. For me, when I first got started in real estate, I was living paycheck to paycheck, so I couldn't pay for marketing.

And what I did was I went to these Facebook groups. I went to the search box. I typed in, wholesaling real estate, North Alabama, wholesaling real estate, Huntsville, and wholesaling real estate, Tennessee. Because I live right on the Tennessee-Alabama line, so I'm pretty close to either way. So I got in all of these different real estate investor groups. And one

nugget that I can give you that I didn't know back in back then is there's a search bar for these for these groups and you can go in you can just type in assignment and it'll bring up all the all the leads that wholesalers have put out for assignment and that's what you're looking for you're looking for those assignment deals and listen it's gonna be like spending a crap ton of money on marketing and getting all these people that are telling you to f off and

You know, they're going to be just as bad leads as some of those. But what you need to do is you need to go through all of them, run your numbers, and make offers on these properties, and call these people, talk to them. Get the feel, get the understanding of how to talk to people, how to negotiate, how to get information from them about the property. Even if they have it listed on the post, you know, go through and ask them, hey, how many beds, baths, square foot is this? How many?

What kind of work does it need does it need a lot of work a little bit? Well, what does that look like just flooring paint light fixtures? Or does it need to be fully gutted things like that? Just get comfortable You don't have to get a deal don't you don't need a deal right off the bat You don't have to have if I could give you one piece of advice is you don't have to have a deal Don't force a deal right up front right get comfortable talking to people on the phone about leads and you will

Wyatt Reed (04:47.462)
not waste your money on marketing. promise you that. So get comfortable with these guys. Call up these wholesalers that have the deals. Once you get some information, we've got scripts and things that you can use. Just DM me or hit me up after this. Follow me on Facebook or wherever that you're listening to me and just say,

Send me your script. I'll send you a bundle of stuff. I'll send you our scripts, our calculators, and all that, kind of like a starter pack. So if you want that starter pack, just hit me up somehow, some way on Facebook or TikTok or something like that, and I'll get it out to you. And that'll kind of help you get jump started in getting leads, getting conversations going, right?

And then once you're comfortable, it should only take you a couple of weeks. If you're doing this consistently, that's another key, is doing it consistently. If you decide, hey, I'm going to sit down for an hour a day, you need to sit down every single day for an hour, except for Sundays, and call people and talk to them about leads. Go through these Facebook groups and find leads. Call these agents. Find leads. Look on the MLS. Find leads. Look on

for sale by owners. There's like 100 for sale by owner websites that you can go to and scroll through. And you can even, even on the MLS, even on these for sale by owners, even on Craigslist, you can go in and create notifications that will send you notifications when prices change or things get sold or they don't get sold or whatever. So create the notifications so that you can keep track of that stuff. And get on Facebook.

Marketplace and and you can do the same on that as well And then we got paid leads once you get comfortable talking to people get into the paid leads if you're in our if you decide to join our coaching like you can get into the paid leads way quicker because we have Tuesday night sales calls where we roleplay we teach you how to pitch multiple offers we teach you how to have a conversation with the seller instead of just You know listening to a script or reading off a script, but if you're not in the group like

Wyatt Reed (07:01.932)
Get comfortable with these free leads first so that you're not wasting your money on the paid leads. You can even go on YouTube and listen to people like Brent Daniels or, Brent Daniels has a lot of the good sales calls and things like that. Just look up sales calls on YouTube for real estate and you'll find hundreds of them. And just get comfortable, practice, practice, practice, practice. But don't just get into the,

Content and just be learning and learning and learning get on the phone. That's the hardest thing for people is to get on the phone, right? So let's get into these paid leads, which are obviously my favorite but but So paid leads what's a paid lead? It's anything that you spend money to get leads calling you right so postcards Everybody and their mom does postcards. That's because it's a tried-and-true method. It works. Okay

People send out fake checks, send out postcards, they send out letters. They send out, if you talk to REI Printmail, which if you tell them that we sent you or use our link, you'll get 10 % off your first campaign. But if you talk to them, they have over 100 different mailing pieces. And guess what? They do this across the nation. So they have data across the nation on what mail pieces work and where and what.

What offers working best there what? Color what font everything they can do it all for you It's all a done-for-you system when I first got started and I first started doing postcards I sent out maybe a thousand postcards, and I created them myself, and it was Terrible I created them myself I've done the messaging I sent it out I didn't get a single deal But I got a lot of calls and I got a lot of f us and that

Actually stopped me from doing postcards for a while probably probably another year before I decided to do postcards again But I didn't do it properly I didn't have someone telling me what I needed to do when you work with someone like REI printmail They do it all for you, and they tell you what you need Then you have texting and cold calling so you know when you're first getting started you can do you can do it yourself and do it cheap right you can use launch controller you can use

Wyatt Reed (09:22.222)
You can just pick up your phone and start cold calling right or if you want to use an auto dollar you can use an auto dollar to just automatically make phone calls for you, but For me again. I like the done for you system, I like other people doing it I like other people taking the calls. I hate taking phone calls. I hate making phone calls, so that's why I love done for you system, so for example lead mining pros

Nick Nicholas he was on this podcast too, so if you you can go back and watch the Nick Nicholas episode, but he's the owner of Lead mining pros and they do texting and cold calling for you And what happens is they take these leads they vet them and they send them to you and now you're talking to people Who actually want to sell their house not just picking up the phone and calling someone and saying hey? This is why from local homebuyer blah blah blah blah you

you know, would you be interested in selling your house and then telling you to F off, right? They're doing all that, they're taking all that front end off, off of your back and they're doing it all for you, right? And then you've got things like cold call, or you have things like PPL, PPC, this is getting into the more expensive side of marketing where, I mean, we're seeing like anywhere from 35 to $4,000 per.

contract. So that's pretty expensive for marketing. That's anywhere from $250 to $300 a lead. And PPC and PPL are pay per lead or pay per click. You have somebody else set it up and they're sending you leads as well. They're some of the most hot, some of the hottest leads that you can get because people are actually filling out an application saying I want to sell my house, right?

So you need to hit these guys as quickly as possible. Usually they say within the first 60 seconds of them filling out that application and sending it in, you need to be on the phone calling them, right? And so what you'll notice is like people fill these out all times of the day, all times of the night. And so if you've got a good CRM, you can have it set up to where when they come in, it'll send them a text saying, hey, I got your application. We'll be reaching out to you soon.

Wyatt Reed (11:42.39)
and that way you can hit that person as quickly as the application comes in. And then you got bandit signs. think these are very overrated. can just go to dirtcheapsigns.com and buy 50 to 100, however many, and start setting them out. But there are laws against bandit signs. That's why they're called bandit signs. And what you need to do is you need to...

Definitely look up all the laws and stuff. Like some places that you have to put them out like Friday night and pick them up Sunday. You know, can't stick them in certain places. Like the city limits of some cities, you can't stick bandit signs unless you own the property. You know, so just be careful with those and look up the laws. Be careful with all of these and look up the laws for all of them because there are laws that are in place for, you know, you like specifically like Georgia, for example, for the postcards. You have to pick

put a big, statement on your postcards, or you're supposed to anyways, saying that this is for me to, I don't remember exactly what it's supposed to say, but it pretty much says that I'm just trying to get you an offer on your house, right? So it's like solicitation or something like this is just solicitation or something like that.

It's crazy, but the laws are changing always. You should always be up to date on your local real estate laws for marketing. Texting is getting more more more regulated. It's harder day by day. That's why I want somebody else doing it. I don't want to deal with it. When I was texting full force and I was doing it myself, I was shut down. When I get shut down, I'd be shut down for a week and our pipeline would dry up and I'd be on tech support like...

You know, I'd be over here talking to my VA saying, hey, call tech support, get the campaign back up and running. And it'd be a week before we were back up and running. So we would just eat, you know, we'd see our profit go out the door, right? And then it would take forever to get our pipeline filled back up. those are just some of the paid ways, some of the freeways. Those are what I recommend for the most part. The thing is about

Wyatt Reed (14:00.212)
lead generation is you've got to be consistent with it. If you say, I'm going to send out a postcard campaign, you need to sit down and go through your budget and say, OK, well, here's my monthly income. Here's my monthly expenses. I can afford to put this much into marketing every month for the next six months and not stop. I cannot stress this enough. It's got to be consistent because

I see this all the time. People will drop a postcard campaign in, let's say Athens, Alabama, and then they won't get anything the first month. Then they'll move it to Decatur, Alabama. They won't get anything. Then they'll move it to Huntsville, Alabama. Then they won't get anything. You know why? Because they're not consistent. And these people quit so often. It's crazy. You've got to be consistent. You got to hit the same spot and don't spread it out too thin too.

I see that all the time too is if you're only doing like thousand postcards, think of this, like let's just say you're hitting this city that's like 20,000 population. You're only sending a thousand postcards. That's very, very, very thin. And I see some people send a thousand postcards out to a couple of different cities. That is spreading your marketing way too thin. You need to start in one location. And if your city's too big,

then start in a single zip code and hit that zip code until you can expand, right? Make sure you are going local and very small, right? Once you get your deal, do it consistently. Once you get your first deal, up your marketing and do more, right? Once you start getting leads, then you can start tracking KPIs and we'll talk about that on another episode, but.

once you start getting deals, tracking KPIs, that's how you get that consistency. So many people lack consistency in their business because they just don't do it. They don't do the hard, I mean really it's easy. I was gonna say the hard things, but it's easy. Just do the marketing consistently every single month and you're gonna get a lead. Don't tweak the marketing until, unless you're tweaking it to do more,

Wyatt Reed (16:23.724)
Because you got a deal, don't ever move it or tweak it down until you've got at least three months worth of data to make an educated decision on that. I always say six months, but don't, at a minimum, three months worth of marketing to make a decision on whether you need to move it or not. So that's what I have to say about lead generation. It's the most important thing that you should focus on as a

new real estate investor. And so I just want to thank you guys so much for listening to the Ascend Your Success podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who'd love it. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. For more resources, visit ascendyoursuccess.com. Check us out on social media. And remember, success isn't a destination, it's the journey. I'll see you next time.