Investing In Real (Estate) Time
Many entrepreneurs have great ideas to create passive income in addition to a day job, but successfully doing it isn't easy. Creating a program and marketing it successfully is no easy feat, which is why we have had several experts of different industries chat with us about what methods they found success in to build their own business.
Recently, our CEO sat down with Lane Kawaoka to chat about the steps he took to create his own successful group coach and eCourse business around investing in real estate as a side business, while still employed at his day job as an engineer. In this blog, Hollywood Branded learns how successfully market and build a digital community in passive real estate from the expertise of Lane Kawaoka.
A Little More About Lane
Lane Kawaoka. Lane started his venture in new real estate investing in 2009 by purchasing a rental property in Seattle, after living on the road for five years as a construction supervisor. Frustrated by the traditional wealth building dogma, Lane was compelled to inspire and mentor other working professionals on how to do real estate investing and build their own portfolios, which led Lane to develop simplepassivecashflow.com. Online learning resource and passive real estate investing that includes blogs, podcasts, and eBooks.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: So, what got you off the road into investing and now over to Hawaii? How did you get here? What was your path?
Answer: I found this little cool thing where I could buy rental property and just kept buying more and more of it. All my buddies were asking me how was I buying all these properties in Birmingham, Atlanta? Places I don't even visit, and buy it, and get a tenant in there and have them pay me rent checks every single month? And I'm sure we all have friends like this that mean well but they don't do anything, right?
So that was where I just started the podcast back in 2016 as just a means to record my thoughts. And a lot of it, I've thought I've forgotten over the years but that was the start of it, all, is building the audience first.
Question: How did you get, to get other people to start tuning in and listening. How did you market what you were doing?
Answer: I just created a Facebook community. You guys are welcome to join. We talk about investing all day and it's high quality. So, I think a lot of people just started to share it and just a word of mouth. Initially, I think you see what a lot of people do is, they'll just slam it all on social media and it takes a lot of time, especially if you're not paying for a virtual assistant to do that for you. I don't know if it's quite even worth it. But I just made over a hundred episodes before I really started to get traction. And at that point, it took off on its own.
Question: in your Facebook group, were you moderating it? Were you having people ask you questions? How were you getting people to interact with it?
Answer: I think the thing I did differently, I did moderate it, I did filter things, for sure. But I made it more of a niche type of group where we are passive real estate investors. And that's something different about my brand. I don't do any wholesaling or flipping. A lot of it, like I said, is for broke people. I work with high paid professionals and entrepreneurs that have pretty good money coming in from their day jobs or the businesses. And they just want to place it somewhere where they can get the tax benefits.
So that's my brand. And so, I kept it that way and I filtered people coming in. I only let people in that if you had a pretty good, decent paying job. If you are a 30 year old guy taking a selfie, you weren't going to get in. You're unprofessional, you didn't look the part and had a net worth of under a hundred thousand bucks, you weren't getting in. So, I think people caught on to that and they knew it was something different. And then I think that was where it started to attract the right type of people.
Question: Beyond the Facebook group and beyond the podcast, you have launched it into being much more. You have a website, you have coaching, you have all of these different elements. What was the thinking that you took after that?
Answer: I spun off two parts of my business. One side is the education side. The other side is, I actually do deals and I bring in investors through the website and podcasts. So that side, I'll go and I'll search for large apartment deals or mobile home parks. And people that contact me through the website can join my investor club and they can invest via me and alongside of me because I put my own skin in the game, I'm usually putting 25, $50 grand at least, into every deal of my own money.
And then the other side is my education side, which I have a mastermind of passive investors. Again, you don't get in unless you're of the right pedigree. And it's a select group of people in there. We do biweekly conference calls via Zoom. And I make everybody sign confidentiality agreements because a lot of people are talking about their personal financial information and it gives me an avenue to speak my mind. Because a lot of things you can't really say on a podcast. It's not appropriate.
And people like that aspect of it, they want to hear the raw stuff. They want to know what not to invest in and whether there are secret deals out there. And more importantly, it's given me the ability to quit my day job. Because initially when I started the mastermind group, I was just running home right after work and jumping on the biweekly conference call. And we're like, "All right, what are we talking about today?" But it's given me the income to be able to quit my day job and focus on how do I add value to these people?
Question: That's awesome. And then with the education side, you have the mastermind, you're also producing additional content and you're blogging. What are you doing to making sure that for the mastermind or to help publicize, and market, and advertise this side of your business? Because obviously it's all a lead gen for your other side of your business.
Answer: Right. And so basically I'm just a content creating machine. I just write articles. Again, I'm an engineer, so I don't really write too well. It doesn't really resemble English a lot of times. So that's why I did the podcast thing. And in my private Facebook group, I'll do live calls where I just ask answer questions. And we chop those up those videos up into more short, breadcrumb type of material. Because the idea is people are going through Facebook feed, they're going through at a million miles an hour.
There needs to be something quick, some value add. And every email that I do, I send out to my list. Or any kind of video or any article. It always like, "Well what? This guy doesn't care. They're a busy, high paid professional, what's in it for them?" So it always seems to be less than one minute video seemed to do the trick for our purposes.
Check Out The Podcast!
Lane has so much of great information from his experience in passive income, so be sure to check out the podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business with digital marketing!
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