This article may be the single most effective way to raise money for your real estate deals. Joe Fairless, a mega successful multifamily investor, was able to increase his total portfolio under management from $3 million to over $100 million within 15 months with this single method. Do I have your attention yet? This method is known as a thought leadership platform, a platform where you can show the world your knowledge of a particular subject, and represent yourself of the “thought leader” of said subject. Ironically, you are reading this article on a thought leadership platform right now. There are several ways that you can do this, and we will go through each of them in this post.
Create your Platform: Multifamilymethods.com is a platform that I use to increase credibility and add value. You want to create a platform where you can show the market your expertise in a particular subject (in this case, real estate investing). In doing this, you will be seen as the thought leader of real estate in your market. This has many obvious benefits, but it will do you absolutely no good if you are not consistent with your content. On your platform you are going to want to have different sources of content.
Articles – An article will have at least 1,000 words, and you will want to post one at least once per week. A great strategy that Hunter Thompson uses (and that I used myself) is to sit down for an hour or two, and create 100 different article categories that you could write about. This will get your creative juices flowing, and it will save you a lot of time in the long run. You want your articles to cover several different real estate investing podcasts, that people can reference and that people can read to see your experience in the real estate sector. This can be very powerful during networking events- as certain topics come up, you can tell people that you wrote about this topic on your website, and that they can read it themselves.
Podcasts – You will also ideally want to post a podcast once per week. If it gives you an idea, Joe Fairless posts a podcast every single day, and he has grown faster than almost any other real estate investor that I have ever heard of. If you are not an expert in the real estate sector, do not let this stop you. Get other experts in the space and interview them during each of your podcast shows. Not only will you gain incredible value by learning from each of these investors, but other investors will begin to listen to your podcast and view you as the expert. This can be incredibly powerful when raising money.
Videos – While recording your podcast interviews, you would be smart to also video record each of these interviews. In doing this, you will spend the same amount of time interviewing your guests, but you will be able to post the videos on YouTube (or other social media platforms) if viewers want to watch the video version as well. People will be able to connect with you better in seeing these interviews in a video version. This is a great Segway to my next point.
Flowing them all together- I am obsessed with the idea of productivity, and as a real estate investor (and any business owner for that matter), being productive, and “flowing” your content together, will be essential to your success. Here are some examples. When creating a podcast, videotape the podcast and put it on YouTube. When creating an article, take quotes from the article and post them on social media. When creating a podcast, have a VA type out the conversation and create an article from that podcast. When posting something on facebook, also post it on Instagram, twitter, and snapchat. Get the point? Maximize the time that you are investing into creating this content, and flow all of the content into different mediums- you will spend partially more time, but you will reach far more people.
None of this matters if you fail to stay consistent. You need to produce this content at least once per week without missing a beat
Go out to networking events and tell people about your platform.