We live in the age of the Internet – Monster.com, Hotjobs.com, Realtor.com, Owners.com, Craigslist – is anybody even reading classifieds anymore?

I am glancing at the last 3 weeks of classified ads in Detroit News / Free Press Real Estate Miscellaneous, Real Estate Financing and Real Estate Wanted Sections – typically 3 sections that are devoted to all things to do with real estate investing.

It is pretty dismal reading. It looks like the same exact person wrote all the ads. All of them want to you to call a phone number. As an exercise I do – a live person answers none of them. Half has voice mails that say something to the effect, “Hey, this is Rick; I am not here; Hit me back!” The other half has voice mails. I leave messages on nearly all of them even wanting Rick to “holler” back at me.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday go by – not even one phone call comes back.

Who is reading these classified anymore? And why are we, real estate investor’s keep running these boring, ho-hum ads over and over again??? Are the people who are running these ads testing these ads against each other, tracking response on what ad is pulling better numbers? What about the quality of the leads coming in? Are these people serious and they have nothing better to do than just to call and chit chat???

The thing which is utterly beyond me is that the bigger the ad meaning more expensive it is – the more likely the chance that nobody will answer the phone or if they do, will know what the heck they are supposed to say.

If you want to play the game – all you have to do to win is:

1. Answer the phone LIVE

2. Know what the hell to say and say it right OR

3. Have a voice mail system pick up the phone that has an extremely detailed message taped (as an aside if you ever see an advertisement for Golden Mortgage in Detroit News for loan officers recruitment with an 1-800 number recorded message – call that number, they have the best message for any company I have ever heard).

4. Or you may even fake it and use an answering service which Nora is using right now for his radio advertisement which will collect the name, phone number, address, email etc and email it to you almost instantly.

You can run the smallest classified advertisement and still come on the top of you do these things. I did all the above very successfully for a long time – small tine advertisements – big response setup translates into good results.

If you are retailing houses than you have to run some classified ads in you local newspaper. Also the local newspapers – the weekly kinds that come out every Thursday and are city specific are pretty decent too. They have loyal readership and if you were running and advertisement a good hook could be – “Wouldn’t you love your loved ones to live close to you? Our beautiful homes and Down Payment Assistance program can make it happen.”

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