The Muse Journal

One of the first things that come to mind whenever I think of internet businesses is the overwhelm that you experience when starting out.  Holy shnickees!!! There is so much out there to go after and each and every last one of them leads you down the rabbit hole of despair.  Especially if you’re a techno-tard like myself. You look at this path and it seems to be a goldmine at the end and then you delve into a little more and your brain starts to hurt.  You look at another path and you start to draw the same conclusions.

Luckily for me I have experienced this before in real estate investing.  There are all kinds of ways to make money in real estate and some are more glamorous and complicated then others.  While spending a several years spinning my wheels and never taking any real action I decided to listen to a few people who had been successful in “landlording“. Now this is probably the least glamorous of the options where you have aspects like short sales, wholesaling, note flipping, regular flipping and they all promise big bucks and Ferraris.  They’re all fine and dandy but if there is something that I started to observe in other successful, wealthy people that had the lifestyle that I desired is that they made their money in less glamorous arenas. True, there are people that make big bucks in entertainment and those other avenues I mentioned but the vast majority of successful people gained their fortunes in the overlooked areas.

Now let’s get back to internet businesses. Since I’ve already been successful in landlording, the effective way (I won’t go into it here at this time), we’ve decided to roll up our sleeves and get to cracking on ecommerce websites where we either source product from the manufacturer or we get a tangible product that we can become affiliates for.  Build out the website, do a little SEO work and then let them ride.  This is something that we initially learned from Tim Ferriss‘ “Four Hour Work Week” and we studied through other marketers.  It’s the avenue that makes the most sense.  It’s an avenue that can be systematized and scaled out.  That’s ultimately what we want.

There’s a lot of work ahead for Christopher and me but it’s work that we’ve seen before our own eyes that will pay off.  Hopefully before long we’ll have a virtual real estate portfolio to match the real real estate portfolio.

I get emails from the mother unit and various others from her generation all the freaking time. They tend to be built around fear both real and unreal.  Kinda like “Chicken Little and the Sky is Falling” type stuff.  Now I’m sure some of the emails that mother is sending me has some truth and validity to it but really….mostly stuff that will probably never come to fruition.  Just more things to put on that tiny tea cup of a plate you have already to worry about.

What I have learned in my 30 years here on earth is that almost every single one of us is filled with fear.  There is only a rare human being who is totally void of fear. Maybe some of your great spiritual leaders like JC, Buddha, Krishna and the likes.  I would imagine that from the age of 5 until about the age of 24 I was completely in fear. Most of it was disguised under the the shroud of cockiness and aggression but there was always fear there.  What if I fail? What will they say about me? How is this going to make me look?  Will I miss out? I wasn’t ever really fearful of any immediate or present danger. It was all about things that weren’t real and didn’t amount to a whole hell of a lot.

One of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain symbolize a lot about the human state of mind currently.

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

We’re way to busy being in our heads about fears and illusions and not living life.  Now there is fear that keeps you from jumping off a ledge and keeps you alive during a present circumstance but what I’m talking about are fears about the future that may never come.

Now you may ask, where are you going with this and what does this have to business? Well it has everything to do with business and this is something that kept me from taking chances and going after my dreams. Being free from the chains of fear.  Not trusting in my intuition and universe (Higher Power, God or whatever you wish to call It) had caused me to not move forward a long time.  I was lost in the world of negative fantasy thinking about all the potential ways that I was going to fail.

Well to make a long story short, I started to question my fears and locate those false, debilitating beliefs that were keeping me from progressing forward.  One thing that really helped me was a little exercise Tim Ferriss recommended in his book Four Hour Work Week.  He says to first off, on a scale from 1 to 10, what is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you if you moved forward on a venture?  Don’t hold back….list everything. On a scale from 1 to 10, how hard would it be to recover from that circumstance? As I started to really put those fears on paper, I saw that the absolute worst that could happen wasn’t that bad and it wouldn’t be that difficult to go back to what I was doing.

The kicker though was when I measured all the good things that could come from pulling the trigger on what I really wanted to do. And then giving it a score based on how life-changing it would be, I was looking at a total 10 on the positive side and only a 3 on the negative side.  I realized that my fears really didn’t have much weight.  Most fears don’t have much weight.

This revelation allowed me to buy my first 5 properties and garner my first few thousand dollars in cashflow.  Now this is coming from someone who was broke, unemployed and buying gas with dimes and nickles 7 years ago.  Total 180 from where I used to be.  Things are only looking up as we work on new ventures and expand our real estate investment portfolio.  So my advice is to make a list of your worst fears about something you’ve been mulling over and then list the life changing experiences that you could have if went through with it.  It’ll put things in perspective for yourself and allow you to see the truth from the false.

Highly Entrenched Keywords can take years to rank for (Typically Main Level Keywords)

100 submissions/month for domain (use submitedge)
1 AMA for each Phrase per month
Add Ezine articles etc

Medium

1 ezine submission with AMA on regular basis.

Light
Stick in AMA and Then Wait 30 days to re-assess; if on the second page then employ rank assassin steps. If lower down then add another AMA article and wait, possibly round of lower end directory submissions.

Build a plan for how long you think it will take to build up the number of links necessary to take over the market. Secondly, build the plan. Thirdly review at the 30, 60, 90 mark to see what’s working and what’s not.

Here is a quick breakdown of tools to use in order to rank for a keyword after you’ve let the site site for 30 days or so…

High End Directory Submission
- target keyword-main pharses
- target url – main domain

EX:

DMOZ – free
Yahoo
BOTW.org – freed

Low End Directoy Submissions
- target keyword – main phrases eg. knee brace
- target url – main domain

Manually – Directoryroll.com
Service Based – submitedge
directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com – automated

High End Article Submissions
- target keywords=80% product phrases – 20% Main phrases
- target URL – internal pages
- target url main phrases – main domain

EzineArticles.com
Articlebase.com
articledashboard.com

note: write 3 separate articles for each of them

Low End ARticle Submissions
- target keyword – long/produc phrases
- target url – internal pages

Manually
masonworld.com
Service based
www.articlemarketer.com
Software
articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com

note: 1 article submitted to all the article directories

We’ve been working this past week on cleaning up our furniture site and a sports related site that we’ve got up now. Both sites are set up with Commission Junction and Amazon… yes we’re playing both sides of the fence for now. They’re review sites for various products and we’ll get an 8-10% commission. We plan on converting to an e-commerce platform once we have traffic built up. This is how we’re building up our traffic:

1) Find something that has relatively low “top ten” competition in google. 80% of the battle is knowing where to fight. To analyze keywords we’re using Mark Ling’s keyword tool, Traffic Travis and looking for things that come back with either a 4 star or 5 star ranking.

2) Make sure that each post/page has 2-3 keywords that can be included in the title and description without looking off.

3) Add those keywords in to the title, description, and each word has a 1-4% occurence rate within the article/post and occurs within the first paragraph or so. (Make sure to have the All-in-one SEO plugin and that the title will be the metatag)

4) Include keywords in tags

5) Write a promotion article, making sure that:

• The title should be keyword front-loaded and copy back-loaded (ex: Desired Keyword: 7 Killer Mistakes 75% of the population makes when trying to “insert benefit desired here”
• the anchor text on the promotion article to the page that we’re link juicing match. (Ex: we have a page that we’re trying to rank for the keyword, “killer sex”. 50% of the links on the sites coming in should link in with the anchor text being “killer sex”

6) Spin the promotion article (We’re spinning to 115% unique which is overkill I’m told but we’re using 1 spin for all the major ezine submission sites)

7) Submit to the following 4 ezine directories…

• http://www.ezinearticles.com (make sure to do this one first – once its been approved submit to the other ones)
• http://www.goarticles.com
• http://www.articlecity.com
• http://www.Articlealley.com
• a good place to pick up other ezine sources is by using http://www.vretoolbar.com

Submit the article to Article Marketing Automation

9)Find some sites with higher page ranks that we interact on, thereby building our link juice.

• we’re shooting for 3-4 sites
• you can use the following in the google search bar to find good sites (MAKE SURE NOT TO JUST SPAM)

site:.com inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.org inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.gov inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.com “powered by expressionengine” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.org “powered by expressionengine” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.edu “powered by expressionengine” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.gov “powered by expressionengine” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.com “Powered by BlogEngine.NET” inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.org “Powered by BlogEngine.NET” inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.edu “Powered by BlogEngine.NET” inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”
site:.gov “Powered by BlogEngine.NET” inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”

10) Use SEO Quake to search by Page Rank so you interact on the highest page ranked page as possible.

And those are the 10 steps were using for our sites right now. Hope it helps you start making money faster.

Get Your Three Free Property Locating to Contract Videos

Learn how the pros locate investment properties using other people’s

and how to get the property under contract for less than $50.

From: Bryan Batson

Hi,

My name is Bryan and I’ve made a few “property locating” videos I’d like to send you.

If you’ve been in the business for awhile and know all the tricks, then you won’t need these…but if you’re just starting out or struggling then make sure you enter your below (or to the right side) and I’ll send you a few new videos over the next several days.

You’ll learn how and what kind property to locate on your own and then how to leverage other people’s time and effort to locate them for you.  I’ll then send a video on how to get a property under contract for less than $50. Plus I’ll give you some quick easy tips that has helped me find properties that have earned me quite a bit of passive income and wished that I had when I first started.

Look, I’ve been investing for a few years now and really enjoy helping you and others get started. But you gotta take a little action to get off the ground.

Enter your email below, watch these freebie videos and start learning. you can thank me later!

I’ll send your videos here:

Talk soon,

Bryan

I’ve worked with many potential investors get their first single family investment property and there usually is a fear to pull the trigger.  Almost every investor initially goes through this fear.  Hell…I did as well! Paralysis!

Well there is a cure. Whenever you find that first property that meets your requirements for cashflow, equity and returns, you first goal is not to buy. Your first goal is get a contract on the property and then place it under option period of 7 to 10 days.  At that point you do your inspections and analysis without risking a whole lot of money.  If the inspections are kosher then you get your bids for insurance and financing. If these are looking good then you can move forward with the closing. If they are not what you want, then terminate the contract before the end of the option period. You’re earnest money is never at risk.

With the proper knowledge and facts about the property, you can make a good decision as too whether or not this is going to be a property that’s going to make you money.  You’ll probably still have a few knots in your stomach during first experience but after you go through with some help, you’ll realize that it’s not so bad.

Just get it under contract and go from there.

Why? Because it’s on sale, that’s why! Foreclosures are still rising and prices still continue to fall but rents in most areas have only dropped slightly if not stayed even.  This being said, you can pick up a house for a small percentage of what it used to be valued at and then rent the property out until the market turns.

The cashflow is great in most of the areas here in Texas and a lot of other areas of the country right now.  Since you can buy a property for less than a few years ago and because property taxes are going down along with the values are cashflow increases. That’s because the rents haven’t really changed much.  Here we used to consider $200 a month in cashflow to really good just a few years back. Now we are seeing $300, $400, and in some cases $500 plus in cashflow for single family houses.  It takes less properties to retire. Sweet!

Since you can buy the properties a lot cheaper now, you can potentially capture a lot of equity. Also, there are so many foreclosures out on the market right now, you can negotiate with sellers to get even better prices or terms.  All the while increasing your net worth one house at a time.

One thing you need to do if you’ve ever been interested in real estate investing, you want to find a better way fund your retirement, or your sick of what your currently doing to for a career and want to replace your income, is to act now.  Real estate investing is not for everyone but opportunities like this done come very often and I can tell you from my experience, it’s very freeing.

Real estate has always been a great vehicle for investing.  There are many different ways that you make money in real estate whenever it’s done right (or the way that I was taught and teach others).  Here are the ways a brief explanation.

1) Cashflow: This is the passive income we seek in real estate investing.  We want income flowing to us each month.  An example of cashflow would be say you have a house that rents out for $1,000 a month and your total payments (PITI or principle, interest, taxes, and insurance) is $800 then your cashflow for the month is $200.  Yes this is a simple example and yes there are other things to consider but we’re keeping it simple here.

2) Equity Capture: Whenever you buy house for let’s say $70k and it’s actually worth $100k then you’ve just captured $30k in equity. Of course is not taking to effect possible repairs to be done and closing costs but we’re going to assume there is nothing to be done.

3) Market Appreciation: This is what most investors who got in trouble during the crash were going after.  The method of buying real estate strictly for the appreciation is a mistake.  But historically real estate doubles in value every 20 years since 1776. That being said, it’s always a bonus when the property appreciates but it’s not why we buy investment properties.

4) Forced Appreciation: whenever you can physically change the quality of your asset and make it better than before, this is forced appreciation.  This especially apparent in multi-family where I have a few friends who this with just about every property they buy.

5) Principle Pay Down: If you have a conventional loan, every month you’re making payments to that loan which your renter is doing for you.  With that payment, some of it goes towards taxes, insurance, and interest while the rest goes towards principle.  Usually $50 on average the first year for homes less than $100k.

6) Tax Advantage: Unlike other investments, real estate allows you to take phantom losses every year by depreciating your property over 27 and a half years.  This allows you to pin the loss against the cashflow that you gained and which usually results in no taxes on your rental income. There’s also a 1031 tax exchange that allows you to take the all profits from the sale of one property and roll it over into the purchase of another real estate property that’s one dollar more in value than the last property. It’s essentially a way to keep deferring your taxes until you decide to pay them.  Gotta love those politicians.

7) Last but not least…Mineral Rights: Here in Texas a few of my investors I’m friends with here have actually gotten quite a few dollars for there mineral rights because they were sitting on natural gas a few miles underneath them. Like appreciation though, you don’t buy property because of this.  If it happens, it’s just a happy bonus!

There you have it. Those are all the legal ways you can make money real estate with single family rental properties.

Evaluating a real estate deals has several parts whether you are dealing with single family homes, multi-family apartment complexes, or commercial.  In this article we’re going to stick with the components of evaluating a single family investment home.

A typical “bread and butter” single family investment property usually consists of 3 bedrooms 2 baths, and a 2 car garage.  It’s usually under 2,000 square feet.  Whenever you find a deal your going to need to pull sales comps, a.k.a. comparables, from the MLS (multiple listings service).  Comps are properties in the same neighborhood and within about a quarter mile that have sold within the last six months. These comps also need to be similar to your property for instance it should also be a 3/2/2, should be +/-200, and +/- 5 years from the age of your property.  Once you’ve found at least three comps, you can take the average price per square foot of these properties and come up with an approximate value for your property.

Once you have the property’s ARV, after rehab value, you can start plugging numbers to see if the property meets your investment goals as far as equity.  The second component that goes along with my investment strategy and the most important for acquiring passive income is to look up rental comps in the area just like you looked up your sales comps. After you’ve pulled these comps and calculated what your monthly payments are going to be then you can determine what your potential cashflow will be.

That’s the simple explanation of evaluating single family investments.  We can go more in depth later.