I have repeatedly urged you to develop a list of referral sources and then to solict these guys regularly for commercial loan applicants. As my oldest son once wisely said,"It's better to repeatedly touch ten referral sources than to speak with one-hundred referral sources just once."
Today I am going to give you some tips on writing a regular newsletter aimed at generating commercial mortgage leads.
- Steal my jokes! I like to always include lots of cute, clean jokes in my newsletters. These jokes reward your readers for opening your newsletters. Where can you find hundreds of cute, clean jokes? Just steal them from me. You'll find all of my past commercial mortgage newsletters here, and each one contains at least four or five cute, clean jokes.
- Keep your commercial mortgage newsletters interesting by talking about cool stuff that has nothing to do commercial real estate finance. For example, the best-selling commercial loan marketing piece of my career was about how the Ebola virus almost killed us all (based on the best-selling book, The Hot Zone). Today I wrote a fax newsletter entitled, The Most Disgusting Story I Have Ever Told. I then go on to tell how I stepped in a pool of congealed blood, from a fatal stabbing the night before, while doing a site inspection of a commercial property.
- The purpose of your newsletters is to entertain and intrigue your readers. Don't devote too much of your newsletter to plugging your commercial loan products. To the reader, that stuff is boring. Think of a one-hour TV show. Most of the hour is devoted to following some likable cop around while he hunts down a cruel killer. Then we have BRIEF word from our sponsor. The key word here is brief.
- And don't be afraid to write! You might not have been an English major in college, but I'll bet you can tell a cool story in a bar after work, right? Just tell cool stories, like you were talking to one of your buddies over a beer.
If you get serious about commercial real estate finance, you may also want to take my wonderful new course, Marketing for Commercial Real Estate Loans.
