getting good at MARKETING that information. They’re running a marketing contest here for the best marketing programs that people have put on, that have generated the most results. One couple who’s in the contest decided they were going to become “the” real estate investing gurus in Maryland. Of course, they had NO real estate investing experience, and had only taken 1 bootcamp from one of the old-time ‘gurus’, but who cares about THAT small detail? Anyway, they laid out the marketing plan they created. In a matter of a couple of months, they had created marketing and promoted a seminar at which they sold almost $600,000 of seminar registrations. Put another way — they had sold $600,000 of tickets to a real estate investing event, which was being hosted by people with NO real estate experience! Suffice to say, this was just another example of understanding that you HAVE to be in the marketing business. If you’re a great marketer, you can go into almost ANY business or industry and become dominant! I can’t say I really support the idea of marketing something that you have no EXPERIENCE in.. since that’s a bit of a problem in the real estate investment world. I can’t say I’d want to be one of the people who registered for that event, since I’m not sure what kind of quality content they’ll get. Hopefully they bring in guest speakers who know what they’re doing. In any case, it hammered home the point about how critical MARKETING is to any business. With our training programs grown so much over the last few years, I think I’ve been fortunate that not only do we understand how to market, but the product (training) we deliver is considered world-class. It helps that I’m out investing on a daily basis too. If I’m going to get on stage to teach people about real estate, I figure I should know what I’m actually doing! I just wish everyone took that approach when getting into the ‘seminar’ business!]]>