Introduction – How I Got Started in DIGITAL MARKETING

I cannot just share my digital marketing results without sharing with you how I stumbled into this whole thing in the first place.

Digital marketing started for me back in 2006. 

Shortly before that I had launched my real estate business back in 2005.

I attended a course which I paid $3,000 for around December 2004. 

I closed my first deal in 2005 and that same year I was actually finishing my master’s degree in college. 

So my attention was all over the place.  But in December 2005, I was able to close a deal winning a net profit of $10,000. 

As a graduate of computer engineering and engineering management, I’m always thinking about leverage.

I’m always thinking,

“How can we make things a lot easier?”

“How can we do things a lot easier?”

“How can I do this business without wearing a suit and tie?”

I’m always thinking…

“How can I accomplish the things I want without being under some kind of rules while living my life in freedom?”

That’s what I call leverage.

Here is what we do with real estate… if you’re familiar with real estate wholesaling…

We lock up properties under contract, and then we’ll sell that contract for a nice fee.

It was not the easiest thing to do.

There was always this fight with competition to secure buyers.

So in 2006, I decided to put together a website inbuiltequity.com ; the website no longer exists because the majority of my real estate flipping business is now in partnerships.

That was my first professional attempt at leveraging digital marketing for real estate.

I put the website together and I sold $3 million worth of real estate properties on it.

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But a few years before that, I think maybe about my junior year… going to my senior year at NJIT, there was this gentleman that came up to me and said,

“Hey, you know you could do some Internet marketing stuff”?

I was confused.

I didn’t know what he was talking about, 

But he showed me some receipts of him basically making $25,000 the previous year simply by doing business on the Internet.

Remember, this was the early days around 2003-2004. These were my first encounter with digital marketing.

It stayed at the back of my mind and I wanted to continue to explore.  I was also busy with school projects.

But eventually, I stumbled into some kind of infomercial and I ended up in another seminar somewhere.

I don’t remember the exact details.  All I knew is that I stumbled into the idea called drop shipping.

What is Drop Shipping?

Drop Shipping is essentially leveraging digital marketing to help companies bring customers to their products.

• You don’t have to take care of customer service.
• You don’t have to do fulfillment.
• You don’t have to create the product.
• As a matter of that, you don’t have to store the products in inventory in a store anywhere.
• You don’t have to keep an inventory physically at your house.

Basically if somebody makes an order from a digital property that you create,

They can basically see the order at the company that actually created the product and they ship the product directly to the owner… you get paid.

These were my first encounters. That’s what you call drop shipping.  That was my first encounter with digital marketing a long time ago, 

Digital marketing has always been at the back of my mind.

So even in 2004/2005 when I came into real estate, I was always thinking how I could leverage it but I was doing so well with going all-in.

So in 2008, the market crashed on real estate completely and my whole multi-million dollar business got wiped out.

I had to start all over but now, I wanted to take digital marketing a little bit more seriously.  I went on the Internet to start to search and research, and I stumbled into a guy.

All he did was sit down behind a computer and taught a full-blown course.  I paid somewhere between $700 to $2,000 to enroll.

That course was my first encounter with PPC (pay per click)… which you’re going to learn some more about later on in this series.

So I learned about PPC specifically Google AdWords.  Now it’s called Google Ads.  It used to be called Google AdWords at the time.

I decided to set up a quick affiliate account at clickbank.com because affiliate marketing was part of the skills I learned.

Affiliate marketing is a method to make money from sales commissions selling other people’s products online.

I didn’t have an information product at the time.  

So on Clickbank, I found a course on flipping real estate, put together a few web pages and ran an ad real quick.

In about five minutes, I lost $700 because I didn’t know what I was doing.

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So what does that mean?

I paid $700 for a class.

A class that taught me how to learn more before I jump into a wild, wild west.  It was and still is truly the wild, wild West of Google ads at the time if you don’t know what you are doing.

I lost that money but it was a good start.  Honestly in hindsight, it was a good start because I knew that there’s a real skill set.

Plus when I spent that $700, I actually made one sale with a sales commission of $47 and that was all I needed. It was a proof of concept.

I needed that to know that this was going to work.

So that’s how I started.  That’s how I got into digital marketing and since then, I never looked back.

Now, that was February 2009.  Remember the market crashed in 2008?

In April 2009, I was introduced to a network marketing MLM company called ACN.  I’m not sure if they still exist 

I scrambled for about three months trying to build my team downline.  

I recruited almost 100 people….a bunch of 100 people that did nothing with the business, which effectively means I didn’t make money.

In fact a few months later, I got a check from them for $12. 

Okay.  That’s another proof of concept, another $12.  That makes how much? About $59 so far.

… and I spent how much to get started in that company at that time?  I think I spent about $700. 

Plus, I got my family member started.  I spent another $700 about three different ways.  So maybe I spent $3,000 before I was done with that, and I made $12. 

But again, it was a success story because basically, this is me going through this journey to understand how marketing works.

I wasn’t thinking like that. It did hurt at the time.

But later on in the year 2009,  I stumbled into a company that was basically helping people that are networkers get on the internet; MLSP.

And I went in… I dived in and spent another $700 to enroll and learned the skill set.  I just became a part of that community.

Within a few months, I did bring my brother on as a partner to help me at that time, and within a few months, we were all over the place and we learned the skill set called Search Engine Optimization.

It is also another skill that you’re going to be learning in this series.  It’s called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

So earlier I talked about PPC.  Now we’re talking about Search Engine Optimization.  Both of them are skill sets that allow you to attract people from the search engines.

See…when you have a question, where do you go right now today? Where do you go when you have a question about anything… About everything?

You go to Google.

So what I’m talking about right now happened more than 10 years before this point, and it’s still very valid today.

And yet, there have been so many other things that came up since then.

There’s been social media, hashtags, and more stuff like that; different little gimmicks and stuff, driving for dollars in real estate, talking to friends and families in network marketing.

Well, talking to friends and family has always been there.  But driving for dollars is some new thing that people are running with.

Cold Calling has been there forever but they are becoming less and less effective.  Do you know why?  Because people have the power of choice.

People can literally go there and google your name and if they can’t find anything about you, 

…boom! 

Your opportunity is all of a sudden doomed. 

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But anyway, that’s what we’re talking about. That’s how I got started in digital marketing way back in 2006, but it kind of like you can go back to 2004,

…and in 2010, I started selling my own personally created information products that I created from all that journey.

And one of those products actually cost $5,000.  I increased the price to $15,000 very quickly and reduced the number of my personal involvement by half and I still made more money just by selling what I know.

In 2014, I brought my digital marketing skill set into real estate, and some of you know me by way of real estate, and that’s why we’re here right now.

For you if you are in real estate people, this is a skill set that you need to learn because this is gonna set you apart from the rest of the world, 

…but not just real estate; any business.

See, we’re talking post-covid era.  2020 got wiped out…deleted that off the calendar.  And a lot of people are gravitating towards digital marketing right now because of this.

See, I was just listening today on Clubhouse to a young lady who used to go over to people’s houses and give them make-up samples.

 But then when covid, the pandemic hit, everybody was forced to stay home.  There was a lockdown, and most people were also afraid to allow strangers into their houses.

When I say strangers, I’m talking about anybody that doesn’t live in your house.

And all of a sudden everyone started to wake up to digital marketing.

So digital marketing is not going anywhere.  No matter what type of business you’re in, this is something you need to learn…

… And that at least it’s in addition to what you already know how to do.

If the world goes back to what it used to be, which I think it will, the need to leverage digital marketing, tools and platforms won’t ever go back or away again.

Now, everyone and companies started to go on zoom for meetings.  Everyone started to do everything digitally.

I just want to give you a heads up of how I got into digital marketing and how I got here.

So it’s not something I started yesterday and decided to teach; like many people are doing right now.

They learned something yesterday and are trying to teach you today.  That’s not what this is.  It’s something I’ve practiced.

You can go to myEmpirePro.com. You can go to all my different Web properties out there.  You can literally google my name and you’ll see my footprints as far back as that time.

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