How Real Estate Investors Can Make Consistent Content- Easily

Mike Hambright (00:33)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today we’re gonna be talking with my good friend Josh Culler, We were just catching up with him. It’s been a little bit while since we talked, but we’re talking about leveraging AI to create content. So I think we’re at a point now where there’s tools and stuff that make it easier than ever to create content, but there’s still a lot of strategy and there’s a right and a wrong way to do it. And quite frankly, it’s kind of like ⁓ a fitness coach can tell you you need to work out more and eat better, but there’s, you know.

obesity epidemic in America. Everybody knows they need to work out and eat less. But few people do it without some kind of coaching without kind of holding your hand. And so we’re going to talk about like how to be successful in your business by building your own brand and using AI to create content. So Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Culler (01:18)
Mike, it’s good to be here, man. I love catching up with you and I’m super excited to jump in.

Mike Hambright (01:23)
Yeah, yeah. tell us a little bit about you. You’ve been creating content as a service for people for a long time. Like maybe just tell us a little bit about your background and then we’ll kind of dive into what’s working now and we’ll kind of go through this topic a little bit.

Josh Culler (01:38)
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that, man. I will keep it short and sweet. If you guys want to learn like completely more about me at the end of the show, Mike’s going to have me kind of plug someplace where you can get connected with me. So, you know, take advantage of that and learn more about me there. But I’ll keep it short and sweet. So I have been in the real estate investing space for now going on 13 years, actually a little over 13 years at this point now.

⁓ Way back in the day, I got started right out of high school. So I’m currently 32 years old. So I jumped into it ⁓ literally right out of high school, got hired by a local real estate investor, friend of mine. played basketball with his dad, owned a few hundred rentals in the area. And so I was doing all kinds of the caveman marketing.

Mike the the bandit signs the pre looks Craigslist postings like all all the good stuff and back then those market conditions were much different when we’re talking in 2013 ish 2014 2015 and All acquisitions was back then was just placing bids on HUD auction on molest and that sort of thing and all the marketing was built towards Building buyers lists and getting buyers for the deals that you had

So I work with that those people for about six seven months and got hired by our good buddy Gary Harper to work with him David Richter was in that organization ⁓ There was a few other people that just really big dogs There’s a great great organization to be a part of and we were doing a few hundred deals a year wholesaling and then ⁓ I at that time was still creating content and that was because the market conditions were all about building buyers lists ⁓ We were putting out content specifically for buyers. So we were literally like we started a podcast

For buyers then we started getting buyers on the podcast and interviewing them as guests talking about the deals that they bought from us and stuff like that just practice wise it was all about content sending out emails and Taking that seriously and so that’s kind of where I got my grounds for it And of course walking through properties videoing houses taking pictures of houses. That was also content creation You can throw that in there But there was also the crafting of like the the advertising that we had to put out There was a lot of you know thought process that went into that and so spent my whole time

in the marketing field as in the real estate investing space. And then 2019, March of 2019, I went full time into doing what I am now, which at the core, there’s three main things that we do. It’s full social media, podcast, and YouTube management from start to finish all on the organic side. I still might do work with 100 % real estate investors. So that’s a lot of fun.

Being able to stay niched into this industry. It’s great industry to be a part of and I love the people I get to work with active investors coaches people have masterminds all that good stuff ⁓ and so that’s where I stay focused and now we’re turning on this head where ⁓ AI has come to the forefront here, you know

We wind the clocks back three, four years ago. It was writing the TikTok Instagram wave where you could post a video. Your first video could get a couple million views and you can go viral. We’re not in those days anymore, but there is a new resurgence of not just social media, but content as a whole when it comes to AI. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today. That’s what I’ve been focused on a lot. And so that’s the nutshell there.

Mike Hambright (04:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. One thing we were just talking about before we hit record is a lot of people struggle. I want to talk about ideation in just a minute, like coming up with ideas to talk about, because I think that’s what a lot of people struggle with is like they’re carrying around their phone all day long. And obviously the devices are easier than ever. It’s in your pocket, most likely. Right. And so but a lot of people are like, why don’t I know what to talk about? And the fact is, for real estate investors, like they are immersed in

an opportunity, unlike few people that create content all day long, they’re looking at houses, they’re talking to sellers, they’re talking to members of their team about something bad that just happened. All those are perfect ⁓ ideas for what to talk about. Just day in the life type stuff is what really people wanna mostly hear about,

Josh Culler (05:34)
Yeah. Okay, so what I always go back to, so the strategy that I lay out, I’ve been laying it out for a very long time. So even before AI came around,

And I do think that even with AI, reinforces the thought process even more. So my definition of content marketing is just answering questions that your target demographic has about who you are, what you do, and your industry. So a great example is if you are an active investor and you’re marketing to motivated seller leads, question that they might be asking is, what’s the difference between selling my house through a real estate agent and selling it to a cash buyer?

that’s a question they would have, so you shoot a video on that answering the question. And so at the core, that’s all it is. So principally, before AI Mike, I would have to tell people like, you know, all of your lead managers, your acquisitions people, your sales people, whatever you wanna call them, every single time ⁓ a person on the phone has a question, write that question down, there’s topics for you.

And then there’s a whole kind of ideation phase we could go through. Now with AI, it’s easier than ever. Here’s a really hot tip for you, Mike, and the listeners is go to your website. Hopefully we’re gonna just assume you have a good website built out already. Okay, we’re just gonna say that for now. You have a website, go to your website, copy the link URL, pop back into ChatGPT and say, I’m trying to shoot video content for social media and I need 25, 50, 100, 1,000, name your number.

Topics that I can do for video content. Here’s my website Please scrape it and then hit the deep research button and then hit go and then it’s going to spit out an Unlimited amount of topics for you to be doing video content on and you can tweak it like I’ll tweak it and I’ll say, you know ⁓ Stay focused on this silo of topics like we’re very specialized in probate. So stay focused in this We really like to buy pre foreclosure. So stay focused in this topic

You can kind of tweak it that way. And then afterwards, Mike, I’m going in and and I’m saying, OK, great. Here’s the topics that I like. So I like topics five, 10, 12, 20, 22. Please give me hooks for each of those and maybe an outline of what I can talk about and discuss. Help me craft all the actions. So that’s kind of the process I would go through. And just with that alone, you shouldn’t run out of ideas to talk about. And again, like like you and I talked about this, too, is like there still needs to be somebody that pushes the button. Right. Like it.

Mike Hambright (07:59)
right.

Josh Culler (08:05)
Like AI is gonna do a whole lot of the heavy lifting for you. It’s gonna take away so much work, but you still need to go in and give those prompts. So at this point, Mike, if people aren’t doing it, I would just say it’s laziness, but there’s probably a lot of other options.

Mike Hambright (08:13)
Right.

Yeah. Well, think a lot of people,

that’s one of the benefits. when I had, you know, I talk about, gave this example of a fitness coach. hired a fitness coach a couple of years back and helped me make a pretty significant transformation. And the stuff that it’s like, it was just almost like having an accountability partner. It wasn’t, it was like, I was doing stuff that I knew I needed to do, but now I’ve got somebody holding me accountable to it. And it just kind of forces the issue of like,

Josh Culler (08:34)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (08:43)
from this time to this time, this is what you’re gonna do on Tuesdays and Fridays or whatever, you know? And so, hey, I wanna ask a couple of questions here. So I think with a lot of real estate investors specifically, like the important thing is to figure out who is your message for? Because I think what a lot of real estate investors go out and do is they’re like, hey, let me show you how we made $40,000 on this house. And it’s like a case study of the house. But if you’re selling coaching, that’s a great topic.

But if you’re trying to position yourself to talk to solve problems from motivated sellers, that is not a good topic, right? It’s more of like how we helped somebody, know, somebody went through a divorce and how we helped them solve their real estate issue and stuff like that, right? So I think it’s very, we talked about a bunch of topics you come up with, but I think people really needed to find who is the avatar that you’re marketing to and then stick to it because real estate investors, probably all entrepreneurs are like,

shiny object syndrome, they’re like, well, now let me talk to you about how I changed the motor in my 1969 Mustang. It’s like, you gotta keep it pure and just focus on that, right?

Josh Culler (09:55)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So you bring up a really, really good conversation. see, I mean, you and I both probably see it from a lot of different people. ⁓ and it, it, so what I really bring this back around to is it’s, it’s marketing, like everything that we’re talking about, Mike, when it comes to this kind of stuff, it just goes down to fundamentals and marketing and sales. So from a marketing fundamental standpoint, marketing 101 says, know your target demographic better than they know themselves. So if you know them truly as good as you should,

then you know what type of content they’re gonna consume and where they’re gonna go. And not just content, but marketing as a whole. So let’s say for example that you were told, you went to a mastermind and you were told by somebody you should start a podcast. So then you go out and start a podcast, but the podcast is directed towards motivated sellers. Okay, well let’s sit down and think about that for just a second. Does that actually make sense? Because is a motivated seller somebody that’s gonna come back to your weekly podcast and listen to,

You talk about how you’re gonna buy their house from them on a weekly basis like probably not and i’m just gonna tell you no ⁓ but here’s the thing is that like we have to understand the reason for that is because the motivated seller Has an interest of only identifying who’s gonna solve their problem and whether we like referrals or not. We love referrals However, for the most part your sellers are only gonna sell one house to you. You’re probably never gonna hear them again It’s gonna be a very transactional process

Mike Hambright (10:59)
Great. Yeah.

Josh Culler (11:20)
So the only reason why you would put content out in the first place or any marketing is so that they can identify if you’re the person that’s gonna be able to solve the problem for them. And so once they’ve made that decision, there’s no reason for them to come back. maybe you have a video series that goes out on your YouTube channel instead of a podcast and that’s specifically geared around being a resourceful helper for ⁓ motivated sellers questions, but that’s that. So then if we look at like,

⁓ And Mike I know several people that have brand presence from the motivated seller standpoint or from a personal brand standpoint this is typically where the conversation kind of like gets really great out is if you’re Think of it from this way personal brand or personal like if you if you want to develop that for yourself Should be built around high-level relationships. So that means if you’re looking to raise capital if you’re looking to

⁓ You’re still looking to buy deals, but maybe not from motivated sellers, but from wholesalers or realtors, because there’s plenty of people that do that. And that’s the type of stuff you’re putting out. So with Mike talking about, you know, doing a case study video and showing how you profited 40 grand on this, this deal that probably like if you construct it correctly, it could be good for, ⁓ you know, capital raising, but probably not for a whole like attracting wholesalers, because then they’re seeing what you’re making. But if you’re coaching,

then absolutely, because you have to have that proof that you know what you’re doing so you can tell people what to do, right? And so on. And then on the other side, if a motivated seller sees that you profited $40,000 on their house, then that branding is going to get very convoluted. And most part, for the most part, they’re not going to, but that’s where we have to have brand separation and know that, okay, if we have one brand here that’s a house buying brand,

Mike Hambright (13:00)
you

Josh Culler (13:10)
Who’s my, I call it the North Star. Who’s the North Star? What are we trying to lead to? We’re trying to buy houses from this type of demographic and you need to separate those. So if you’re building a personal brand, inter-demographic is specifically raising capital or bringing in other wholesalers or making relationship with realtors, then that’s what you need to be focused on. That’s the type of content you put out. So.

Mike Hambright (13:30)
Right. So when you talk about kind of the personal brand and a lot of people have, you know, obviously their house buying brand as well as an investor. So let’s say Josh buys houses out of Indiana. So would you advocate that if they’re trying to target a motivated seller and just talk about how they solve? I mean, there’s this, ⁓ I think it was Dan Kennedy or somebody that said this, you basically, you’re trying to insert yourself. You’re trying to create content effectively.

around answering the questions that your prospect has in their mind right now. So it’s like, I think I’m gonna get a divorce. What are we gonna do about our house? It’s like, well, how we help people going through divorce solve real estate problems, you know? And so you create content around that, you know? And so you’re just trying to kind of answer those questions that they have that they might go Google or they might go look on YouTube for. And so like you said, I mean, they’re not gonna go like, what podcast can I listen to? I think I’m gonna get a divorce here. What podcast can I listen

Josh Culler (14:01)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:25)
people listen to podcasts for like entertainment or education on something they’re trying to do with their lives, but not necessarily like to solve a problem in my experience. mean, maybe there’s a myth there for podcasts.

Josh Culler (14:33)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, maybe,

maybe. But the thing is, too, is that like it’s you bring up a really good point because they’re probably not even going to Google and say, show me a video of how to sell my house to X, Y and Z person. They’re looking for the they’re basically indexing the actual question of what to do with the problem that they have. So if it is a tire landlord, they’re saying, you know, it’s inserting it’s what Mike said, it’s inserting your your

Yourself into the mind of the person that’s asking the question like what question are they actually asking? So if a tired landlord is dealing with you know, really crappy tenant and you know They’re having all kinds of issues with them and they’re like I’ve had this property for 60 years I just want to get rid of it. Then what are they asking? So they’re probably asking, you know what to do with a house if I you know, don’t want to remove the tenant and don’t want to deal with this property anymore like there’s

Mike Hambright (15:28)
Right.

Josh Culler (15:28)
There’s

some context which we’ll get into the conversation of AI, but there’s some context that people will be asking around. And that’s the type of content. And just from a principal standpoint, Mike, it’s the SEO, like the search engine optimization of like the way that you’re framing the content you put out to pair it up with the question that’s being asked. Principally, that’s what makes that piece of marketing work effectively is that you are very niched into a very specific topic that you’re answering a question to.

and then your demographic is asking that question. So then they’re getting paired with your video. And I like to look at like the video stuff, ⁓ it’s a resource. It’s a resource for, because principally you’re delivering value, because you’re answering a question. So it’s a resource for the person that’s looking for an answer to the question that they’re asking. And so you put that on your YouTube channel, website, all that stuff, and that’s what it appeared.

Mike Hambright (16:23)
And

on your, know, putting, guess, put it on your website is obvious, but ⁓ whether it’s a YouTube channel or, you know, social media profiles, would you advocate that those are business pages like your Josh buys houses versus Josh Culler as an individual?

Josh Culler (16:41)
Absolutely. So yes, if we’re we’re marketing to motivated seller leads, that’s where the deviation comes in. I think you need to build that brand. So the brand brand where you will appear on it probably because maybe you’re the CEO if you’re listening right now and you’re you’re the person that owns the company and maybe maybe you’re a solopreneur and you’re the only one in your company that’s buying houses. It still needs to be associated with a brand. So it’s ⁓ you know, Josh buys houses dot com and that’s my brand.

then I might have a personal brand as well, but maybe I’m leveraging that for higher level relationships. But the importance of that difference is again, with the type of topics and content that you put out, the algorithms will naturally deviate those from the demographics. So that’s kind of the way it works. Now, if seller finds you there and then they’re like, I wanna go do some research on Josh Culler and go look him up, then they’ll go look me up and find everything that I have going on here.

For the most part, typically people won’t do that. They’ll dig through the company and look for more information about the company. But this is where, I don’t know what works the best between like, if you have your name on the company versus like, ⁓ Indiana cash buyers or something like that. That’s where it’s like, you can have that conversation with somebody else.

Mike Hambright (18:00)
think it comes down to how much an individual pushes themselves to be the face of their brand. So if you like Indiana home buyers versus Josh color home buyers and you’re like on TV ads and you’re like the main face on a postcard and you show up on the website and it’s all about you like people that have like, you know, like Eric Brewer, for example, he’s all he is the brand of his like house buying stuff that that would be hard for him to

Josh Culler (18:08)
Right.

Mike Hambright (18:29)
disassociate his personal ⁓ social media profiles with his house buying business because he’s put himself front and center on that. But there’s also people that are like, it’s just the name of their company. They’re not really the face of it. And if you go look at the website, it has like their whole team lined up there and stuff like that where they’re not trying to be like the spokesperson for their company. so I think that probably is where the dividing line is.

Josh Culler (18:53)
Yeah.

And I think some of it too has, has a lot to do with what other things you have going on because like with Eric, he, ⁓ you know, like he, he has, he has coaching in some regards, like teaches innovations and that sort of thing, but he’s not out there talking about how much money he made on certain deals and that sort of thing. So he does a lot of like on a personal brand, he does a lot of culture stuff. So you’ll see, like, he has a lot of stuff about his team and team building and self-development stuff like that.

Mike Hambright (19:07)
Right.

Sure, yeah I know.

Josh Culler (19:21)
So that kind of stuff may not deter a motivated seller and might actually attract them because they see that this is a real human being. So a lot of it has to do with what you’re doing on both sides of the coin. But if you are somebody that’s talking about the type of deals that you’re doing and case studies and trying to bring in coaching students or even raise capital and that sort of thing, showing you what type of returns you can get somebody, then you definitely wanna deviate those between like.

Mike Hambright (19:26)
Yeah.

Josh Culler (19:44)
a brand brand. Now, again, like you could be on the videos, you could be on the TV ads, but maybe the brand needs to be something a little bit more ⁓ unspecific to your name. And I think that that’s the importance there.

Mike Hambright (19:52)
Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, great. And we could probably have an entire show talking about just ideation, I guess. We have a whole list of others I wanted to get to today. so on the back, just staying on the ideation for a minute, think where a lot of people struggle with is coming up with these ideas. I’ve always and I’ve been, you know, I create a lot of content, too. So I’ve talked for years about.

Josh Culler (20:02)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (20:20)
how to keep ideation as a separate part from creation. Because sometimes people are like, yeah, I need to start creating content. You know, like, all right, I got a little time to create something. What am I going to, gosh, what am I going even say? I don’t even know. And so it’s almost to just have a list, whether it’s in a spreadsheet or a document or somewhere like, you can go to the well and go grab those ideas that you came up with previously. And I can tell you from somebody that creates a lot of content, sometimes I have a list of stuff and I’m like, I’m not really feeling that one today. So let me talk about this one instead. And so it’s good to have a.

a big like bucket of stuff to pull from right because then you can’t make the excuse of I was going to record some stuff but I didn’t know what to say right.

Josh Culler (20:56)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, for sure. And the other thing too is that, so something that dictates that as well is how much you’re putting out also. So, you know, if you are generally putting out, let’s say you’re putting out three social media videos weekly, then you don’t need to be out there shooting like 10 or 20 videos on a weekly basis. You don’t need to be spending more than an hour recording video content. And that has a lot to do with it. And then from there you pick your topics, but.

Mike Hambright (21:04)
Yeah

Josh Culler (21:24)
I do think that it’s important to understand, like when I’m specifically working with a client and I’m bringing them on board for us to manage what we’re doing for them, the number one thing I ask is what does your capacity look like? Because you run a full-time business, so I can’t afford to have you neglect that and then you become a full-time content creator. think a lot of people, Mike, and you I, you know I talked about this a little bit beforehand, and I think that there’s kind of like,

Mike Hambright (21:43)
right?

Josh Culler (21:51)
an understanding that you really have to have about this where you had mentioned like, you know, you are the content. It’s like everything that you do on a daily basis. You could just record that document it. You don’t even need to sit down and like sometimes even think about the topics that you do. You just need to have somebody recording it. I do agree with that, but I think that a lot of real estate investors, even like two, three years ago where they got in trouble was there. They hired a videographer to follow them around 24 seven.

And some people need that, like I get that because they’re at that level, but most 99 % of business owners don’t need that. Maybe you need somebody that can come in once a month and record for two or three hours at a time. You have all your topics ready to go. And then maybe go visit some houses cause you’re putting yourself in the environment and what you’re talking about. And you record the videos there and you just do that in a batching standpoint so that you don’t have to worry about it for the next 30 days. And you can record.

Mike Hambright (22:46)
right.

Josh Culler (22:48)
or you have somebody come in and maybe you have an assistant. Like, look guys, it’s very easy for an assistant to just open a camera or even a phone and record something as you’re talking. Maybe you’re leading a meeting for your team and you’re talking about your new process for the sales process or the lead manager process. You record that and that’s all good content that you could be capturing where you don’t have to do extra video in order to be able to generate content.

But I think that understanding your capacity is the biggest piece of this because you don’t wanna chop out, you know, two hours a week, four hours a week of just recording video, and then you’re only putting out a few social media posts on a weekly basis. But even more so is like, what can your time allow, right? Like, do you have an hour a week to be able to record? Cool, well then that’ll dictate how much we’re putting out on a weekly basis. So if we’re putting out…

Mike Hambright (23:35)
Right.

Josh Culler (23:43)
You know, two core YouTube videos that are 10 minutes long a piece and then five videos a week on social media. Well, is that something I can keep up with for the long term? Because nobody wants to talk about it, Mike, but you know better than almost anybody out there because of how long you’ve been doing this consistency wins the game at the end of the day. And nobody wants it. Nobody wants to say it because it’s not sexy. It’s not something that’s fun to say. And it’s not the new and improved version of content strategy, but it is the truest.

Mike Hambright (24:03)
Yeah.

I’m

Josh Culler (24:13)
form of how marketing works is staying consistent with it and then you improve it over time. Obviously that’s that’s the objective there. But if you start off with like, I’m going to shoot like two hours a week of video and that means I’m putting out like two videos a day on social media and then you do that for three months and then you eventually fall off like you need to build up as you go along.

Mike Hambright (24:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, I’ve talked about that many times in the past because, you know, we were with the Flip Nerd podcast, which was our first podcast that started in 2012. So at the time, there were only like six real estate podcasts and there’s like thousands of them now. But if you go, I don’t know how many there are. There’s a ton. If you go look, though, you’ll see show you’ll find a bunch of shows out there. And if you look at it, you’re like, they haven’t put a new episode out in four years. Right. But

iTunes won’t tell you that. They don’t serve them up very high, but if you do a search, you’ll find a whole bunch of, and not just real estate, every industry, people that got excited about going to start creating content or doing a podcast or whatever, and they do like five or 10 episodes, and two things happen. One is they didn’t really have a good, what I like to tell people is you need to have a good business reason, a business case for why you’re doing it.

Josh Culler (25:24)
Yes, absolutely.

Mike Hambright (25:25)
As if it’s

ego driving you, there’s going to be a point where your business is going through a difficult time or you’re just, you know, like every entrepreneur you take on more than you can, you you bite off more than you can chew. And you’re like, I’m going to, I’m not going to do one this week. A week turns into a month, a month turns into a year. And then you, you, just out. It’s the same thing with, you know, obviously creating content for social media is go into it at a level that you’re going to be able to do consistently for years to come.

Josh Culler (25:38)
That’s the first thing that goes.

Mike Hambright (25:53)
And you should do it. I say this about paid advertising all the time. Like going, I always say like go into a channel, advertise enough to be able to buy one house a month and be able to invest in that for six months without making anything. Like otherwise people go into it for a month. They’re like, I tried and it didn’t work. It’s like it would never, it was never going to work in one month. Right. And so you gotta be super basically we’re beating a dead horse here, but consistency is key. So only go into it knowing that you can do it for literally years to come.

Josh Culler (26:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think there’s like you said, I don’t think there’s much more add to that. But I will just tell you right now, the most successful people that I know of that have put out content, whether it was to build a following or to generate leads, which Mike said it perfectly, like we need to be doing this for a business reason. So if you’re trying to put content out, this is marketing. So the objective, the number one objective is not followers. The number one objective is not video views or likes. It’s lead generation. That’s what we’re putting it out for.

Mike Hambright (26:49)
Yeah.

Josh Culler (26:50)
Now there’s certain practices that you have to do along the way for each of those platforms, because you’re not just gonna post videos on Instagram and just sell the whole time. You need to deliver value. But at the same time, as long as you’re focused on, this generating leads or any kind of brand awareness for me? That’s what the objective of it is for, and you have to focus on it.

Mike Hambright (27:08)
Yep.

Yeah, that’s great. One thing that you just said, gosh, just slipped my mind. That’s really critical is, gosh, I forgot it. So anyway, I’m glad we’re spending this much time on ideation. Yeah. But we got into this to talk about kind of AI, and AI can help you with ideas for sure. mean, it can give you endless ideas. And there is AI to help, certainly more than ever with production and distribution and all that stuff.

Josh Culler (27:19)
I too many things, Mike.

Mike Hambright (27:35)
But you’re right, the hardest part of this is just staying consistent and staying on top of it. mean, that’s what makes or breaks people. It’s almost like you just gotta do that work up front. You gotta commit to it. And ⁓ the rest is easy and getting easier, not taking anything away from people like you that have an agency to help people with this. I think you would agree that tools are making things easier than they have in the past for sure. But you still have to…

Josh Culler (27:57)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (28:04)
Basically, people know they need to eat less and work out more if they want to get in shape, but they still need somebody to guide them down that path and hold them accountable and celebrate with them.

Josh Culler (28:15)
Yeah, I mean, listen, the reason why people use me as a service is because and this is, this isn’t just me. mean, this could apply to any other social media marketing agency out there, but for me specifically, it’s because they don’t have the time or the manpower to be able to push those buttons. Like we are in our like operations, we are using AI and a lot of stuff and it’s trimmed down a lot of our work capacity or workload rather.

For the team members and so that’s that’s really helped a lot Well, you still need somebody to manage it whether it is us or somebody else and for the most part most people will come to us because they don’t have the the knowledge of what but it’s the whole thing like I’ve heard this arm tail. I’m gonna try to not butcher it I should have looked this up specifically, but it came up organically. So there’s a there’s a story where ⁓ there’s a large ⁓ freighter that is, you know sitting in the water and

For some reason it’s just not being able to move it’s there’s something that’s wrong with it So they can’t get the engine started up and they can’t get it going so they bring in a mechanic and he comes in from long ways away they fly him in and he gets paid lots of money just you know, few thousand dollars per hour to work he pops in and then spends less than five minutes finds one thing to fix and then tweaks it and then the the engines start right up and the ⁓ the the captain of the ship says

⁓ well, it only took you five minutes to do it. So we could pay you a lot less, right? And then the engineer says, no, that’s not how that works. I knew what to look for, what to fix and how long it would take me to do it. You did it. So without me coming in and spending five minutes on fixing this, you’re not going anywhere. And that’s a lot of times what service providers will, you know, kind of help people with is, is, you know, knowing what to look for, how long it’s going to take.

and the expectations to set. Plus, like you said, the guidance, because that’s where I invest a lot of my time. It’s not just editing video and putting it out for people. It’s the actual like ideation, the strategy portion of it, and then keeping people on point and consistent. Because when somebody works with me, Mike, I almost act as a coach as well, because you need somebody that is going to hold you accountable. So if somebody is working with me they’re not recording content, I tell them like, hey, look, I’m still I’m still going to run your card like you agreed to this.

Mike Hambright (30:13)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Josh Culler (30:37)
So I’m gonna hold you accountable to make sure that you can get me the content I’ll fly out to you to record video if you need me to or I’ll meet up somewhere or whatever But we’re going to get content recorded because this is what we agreed to and that’s where that’s where you need somebody that can really like personnel wise Maintain that because like you said people get super excited about starting up new marketing initiatives So they’ll do it for two or three months say it didn’t work and chalk it up as a loss and like, okay Well, it didn’t work. I gave it all the effort I did but they really didn’t ⁓

Mike Hambright (30:49)
Yeah.

Yeah, I know what I

was gonna say a moment ago. One other reason why people quit is they don’t think that anybody’s listening. if your goal, you have to think of like, what is your goal? And this is very specific to, we’re talking a lot about real estate investors. If you’re in Dallas, Texas, or anywhere, it doesn’t really matter, anywhere USA, it doesn’t matter if somebody in Pakistan is like watching your content, like,

Josh Culler (31:13)
Yeah. ⁓

Mike Hambright (31:33)
So there are people, there are Moses in the world, they get like huge volume and people, you know, they always get like, are concerned with something going viral. If you’re trying to talk to somebody in your market to solve their problem, you’re never gonna go viral. And if you did, it’s not gonna help you in any way, right? And so don’t get hung up on all the vanity metrics of clicks and watches and stuff like that. You just need.

somebody every once in a while, one person to watch it and sell you their house because you’re going to make a lot of money on it. those vanity metrics are almost meaningless in a local market because you’re never going to go, you’re never going to have big numbers and that’s okay.

Josh Culler (32:13)
The example I always use is let’s take scenario A and B. So scenario A is that you created a video, you put it out and it went viral, got 500,000 views on it in less than a day, but it didn’t generate any leads for you. Was it a successful video? Well, in the eyes of most people on the outside, they’d say like, yeah, Mike, like your video, half a million views in a day, that’s crazy. That’s super good, like good for you. Pat on the back, clap it up, awesome. But you know on the backside, like,

I didn’t do anything for me now theoretically obviously I think a lot of people will combat and say like Theoretically the more eyeballs you can get on a video the higher chances you have of hitting the one person that you need to reach That is correct but if we look at scenario B and we say all right put a video out and it got 500 views in a day and You know did kind of okay or whatever, but it generated to let’s say generated five leads

Mike Hambright (32:45)
Great.

Josh Culler (33:09)
Those five leads turned into two deals and those two deals brought me in $20,000 a piece for a wholesale assignment. Was that a successful video? Most people would be like, hey, Mike, your videos are doing a little bit low. Let me work with you to see if I can get those numbers up a little bit. But you know, no, it was actually successful because it brought in deals for me. It brought in money. And that’s why being so focused on the business side of this is the most important thing.

Mike Hambright (33:32)
Yeah, I think social media has a lot of similarities with SEO in that regard of like, you put out a couple pieces of content and it doesn’t really do a lot. Like if you think of like SEO is like building a brick wall or even content creation is like you put one brick down, like people are just stepping over, they don’t even notice it’s there, but you start to build up this wall and you have this massive kind of library that’s out there. And what I think about content and the same as SEO, guess, is that,

truthfully, it’s pretty common that when I work with somebody or certainly when I hire somebody, I go stalk them on social media. Like I want to see like, what are they posting? What are they talking about? You know, and there’s definitely a ton of people that I’m like, there’s no way I’m working with. There’s no way I’m even like literally put that one in the track. Like they looked pretty good, but now, now that I see that this about them, I’m like now, right? And so it’s the same thing for the content we’re talking about here. Maybe your content is not a lead generator per se.

Josh Culler (34:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (34:27)
but it’s like validates somebody that’s thinking about working with you and they go look for you online and it gives them the confidence to say like, wow, I really like their philosophy or they seem trustworthy or whatever, right?

Josh Culler (34:39)
Yeah.

Yeah. And for the most part too, ⁓ you’ll find that if you’ve done this long enough, that it’s not just the one piece of content that normally converts somebody. It’s like hundreds of pieces. It’s like, it’s the reason why, you you send multiple direct mail campaigns to the same person, not just one. It’s the same reason why you hit them with ads several times. So I have this analogy, Mike, that I…

Mike Hambright (34:58)
Right.

Josh Culler (35:03)
I call it the relevance bridge. You mentioned bricks and so it it brought this up organically and I think it makes the most sense in terms of like the way that like actual marketing works and then getting to your lead. So if you imagine you have two islands, so island one is where you are standing and you have your service, you’re offering whatever it is that you’re trying to market. And then island two is where all your potential leads are. So all the potential people that could work with you. So everybody in your demographic and

They are separated by our roaring rapids and the rapids imagine them to be the daily marketing that your demographics getting hit with not with just other people that are buying houses, but also the Coca-Cola commercial. Also the, ⁓ you know, the, the billboards that they’re driving by for the law attorney. Like there’s, there’s all kinds of different types of marketing that they get hit with on a daily basis. And that’s the roaring rapids. So it’s really loud. They can’t hear you on the other side, so they can’t get to you. And they’re not going to wade through all of.

You know the rapids to get to you So what do you do is that you build a bridge to get to them and you can imagine like mike said each Piece of marketing each piece of content that you put out is a brick that is building a bridge over to them So that you put enough relevance into the bridge itself and then they look at it and they say ⁓ This bridge is super easy to cross because I have all the information that I need to make a buying decision or selling decision

Mike Hambright (36:02)
right

Josh Culler (36:28)
And so they easily walk across it safely to get to you. And that’s ideally what it is. And you create that by relevant marketing. it’s niche into their specific needs. It’s whatever they’re looking for. And that’s how you build it. And it makes the sale so easy if you can market effectively that way.

Mike Hambright (36:46)
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. It’s definitely a long game strategy. Like you’re not going to do anything in a month or a week or even six months. Like you need to be committed to this for a long time. And if you’re committed to your business for a long time, why wouldn’t you be committed to kind of building your brand for a long time? Right. So Josh, Hey, we really kind of stuck on the upfront piece of creating content and honestly the production and distribution and stuff like that. I mean, there are tools that make this easier than ever, but I’m glad we stuck on this because

Josh Culler (36:56)
Absolutely.

Yeah, that’s a good one.

Mike Hambright (37:14)
This really is the hardest part, and think where people need most help. if folks want to connect with you, you obviously do this as a service through color media. If folks want to connect with you or learn more, where can they go?

Josh Culler (37:24)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you being, being willing to give me that opportunity. So, ⁓ there’s a couple of things that you could do. So first of all, as I encourage people, especially if you’re a real estate investor, go listen to my podcast, which I’ll, I’ve had Mike on and I’m going to have him on again soon, ⁓ is called the REI Marketing Weekly. So we specifically talk about marketing and sales. get other real estate investors across the country on to talk about what they’re doing and what’s working effectively for them. And so go listen to that podcast, REI Marketing Weekly. You can find it on the, all the podcast platforms.

And then find me on social media. So Instagram or Facebook, just look up Josh Culler. I’m pretty much the only Josh Culler that’s out there verified. And send me a message. If you want to get connected with me, just say, you know, Mike sent me from the investor fuel podcast and I’d like to chat with you and then I’ll get connected with you. ⁓ And I’m very active on those platforms. So I’m very communicative and that’s the most effective and best way to get connected with me.

Mike Hambright (38:18)
Cool, well thanks for joining me today.

Josh Culler (38:20)
Absolutely, dude. Thank you for having me. This is a blast and you you actually brought out some really good questions that I like Had to skew and think about the process of it. So it’s very good

Mike Hambright (38:29)
Yeah, cool. Well, it’s a good discussion and there’s a lot going on there so from two people that have created a lot of content or think about it a lot, know, Awesome. Well good to have you. Hey everybody Oh, we got some good value from today at the end of the day like I think if whether you’re building your business brand or your personal brand or quite frankly most entrepreneurs should be building both like you have to make sure that you have a good business case for like we talked about make sure that it’s not just some ego driving you it’s You justify it because it’s going to help feed your family also and help you build your business

Josh Culler (38:36)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (38:58)
at the end of the day, which you’ve got to be committed for like everything you got to be committed for the long term play the long game. So hope you got some great value from today. Appreciate you guys. We’ll see you on the next show. Take care.