$75 Million in Funded Loans from TikTok

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can, too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. So since I started doing that back in January, over a six-month period, I received a round fight very close to 5,000 bleeds. And then of those 5,000 bleeds, we're experiencing about a 10% that are converting through to fully closed. That's the way that it's looking at the moment. So in terms of the 10% to pre-approval, which comes in roughly at around your $225 million, which is crazy. Right. I know what I say that out loud. It's like I've desensitized to it because now I've been doing it for so long, but when I say it out loud and I'm on a podcast like this, it reminds me that it's pretty great. It was all from TikTok. Hey, Listers, what's up, Jeff Simford. Welcome to this edition, episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio Podcast. Once again, thrilled you are tuning in here. Hey, quick reminder, if you haven't yet left us a review, I'd be grateful if you did. Take a moment. You're on your smartphone, listening, perhaps. You've got a couple of minutes of downtime. You want to let us know what an impact this podcast has made on you. That'd be awesome if you could take up two minutes and leave a brief review wherever you're listening to this Spotify, Apple, wherever else. That'd be great. Then secondly, as you know, this podcast is brought to you by me and the Mortgage Marketing Institute Pro membership, which the lead thing we do in there right now, we're focused on primarily is being brilliant in the basics and getting aligned with real estate agents by leading with educational classes both in person and virtually over zoom. And look, I've been talking about this for some time. If you haven't yet checked that out, I encourage you to do so. Why? Well, look, in a market that we're entering, we're in, the waters are a bit choppy, right? And you've heard the saying perhaps for more and buffered in the past that when there's blood in the streets, that's when you invest. And there are people getting out of the business. I mean, mortgage professionals. There are people that are deer in the headlights frozen, you know, and there are some weeding out of the agents as well. But if there ever was a time to invest, to push the chips forward on the table, as they say, and go all in on investing, investing in relationships and being brilliant in the basics now would be the time. And you've heard me share the success stories. I've got a couple more to share with you right here. One of our members who's teaching classes, we do a call every Friday, by the way, it's a small group call and it's all about, you know, group coaching to everybody to level up their skills and get better in a variety of things. But anyway, Jessica, one of our members said she was feeling sad because she had to miss the call. Why? Because she was meeting a broker for lunch that has 38 agents, 38 agents, and that they're meeting for lunch to get her on the calendar to do monthly agent marketing classes. Wow. How would you like to be invited to do monthly classes in front of 38 agents per month, right? All about this one, nothing like, and it's, of course, this comes from Glenda, another fantastic member we have. Good morning, nothing like setting two appointments from one post before 7am. And where does she get that post idea from? Well from the content that we share on our weekly calls, that's related to helping agents succeed with video marketing. And I could go on with another one here. That time when you get a $2.4 million lead, that attended one class sat in the back. It didn't say a word that had been following up with her like butter that comes from Glenda as well. And the referrals, the testimonials go on and on and on. You can see in here more about that over at mortgage marketing dot row. Here's another one from Jeremy had my third agent class in two months, every agent there wants to follow up meeting. That's from Jeremy. Carmella just had my third class 24 registered 10 showed up for new agents, three appointments made. Guys, what are you doing to get in front of imperial estate agents? Both ones you've worked with in the past, ones that you want to work with. What are you doing to build your local brand amongst your local population real estate agents? Say what you will about agents, but 89% of people still buy a house, use a real estate agent. And even with the changes in the forecast of purchases of home sales, residential resale homes, not new construction, 5 million predicted to happen this year. How many of those are going to capture in your local market, right? Invest in relationships, invest in building your personal brand. You want more agent referrals, you want more engaging from agents, most originators struggle because their opposition is weak and lame. Therefore, lead with education, lead with an educational proposal and platform that attracts agents to you that reciprocates referrals to you every single month, like clockwork. Go check it out at mortgagemarketing.pro. Okay, this week's episode, I am thrilled to bring you a very special guest all the way from down under as they sigh. So my special guest today reached out to me on Instagram a while back and let me know that he was a fan of the podcast and I thank you for that. But also started sharing his results that he was getting on TikTok. And I was intrigued because I don't often hear from the folks that are doing things on TikTok. And let me just say that people are loan officers, real estate agents are succeeding on TikTok. They're getting referrals, they're closing transactions. And my special guest today, Rob Roper, is his personal story on how he's generated $70 million in closed fundings on TikTok in approximately a year. I'll say it again, $70 million in closed fundings from TikTok. Now, am I saying that you need to dance on TikTok and that you need to do a parody and song? You know, humorous and entertaining as Elvis returned from the grave? No. And I think you'll learn a lot as I did from listening to Rob's story and he talks about what you need to do if you're considering TikTok, right? And how to approach it. And so I think this episode, this conversation will be quite revealing and insightful for those of you that may have put TikTok on the back burner because you didn't think it was for you. You thought your demographic, your audience wasn't there. Well, this episode's for you. $70 million in closed, $5,000 leads in approximately one year, all free, not paid for. And we're going to put a link in the show notes, by the way. If you're interested in TikTok, Rob does have a special offer just for our listeners. You can go to check out more. He does have a course, if you will, a master's course, which will walk you through his exact journey and process step by step, what to do, how to do it, screenshots, images, everything you need to know. A link is going to be in the show notes for that as well. You want to learn more about that? Go check that out. If you've at all considered getting in front of the growing audience on TikTok, these next gen buyers, the Gen Z, the millennials, right? That are on TikTok, and this is a great way for you to get in front of them. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Rob, welcome to the show. Jeff, how are you going, Mike? Hello from Down Under, as they say, right? Yeah, that's it. That's it. So I want to set up the context of this, and this is so cool how this happens is you reached out to me over Instagram a couple of weeks ago or so, and said you were a fan of the podcast, and I'm grateful for that. So thank you. But you also started sharing it with me, like the amazing results you were getting from TikTok. That's what we're here to talk about today. Before we get into that, why don't you give the brief background or how long have you actually been in mortgages as an originator? Yes, sure, sure, sure. I actually, and it will surprise a lot of people if you go into my TikTok page, but I started my broken journey back in, I actually became licensed in May of 2021. So it's only been just over a year. Yeah, so pretty new to industry, but one of my first, my first targets as a new broker was how am I going to, how am I going to get those leads, how am I going to develop new customers? All right, so did you intentionally set out to TikTok specifically? I actually, when I was going through the training in early of 2021 to become a broker and the training over in Australia is probably similar to America and Canada in that it's a, you know, you can do the course in a relatively short period of time, kind of three weeks to a month. So during that time, I was just smashing all of the different podcasts, you're always being one of them obviously, and just trying to learn about different ways that, and maybe find a way that isn't used by a majority of brokers, because I knew that coming, coming into the industry fresh, there were going to be certain areas which were saturated. And so I wanted to go, well, where is somewhere where I don't see any brokers, but I've heard through some podcasts that maybe some people are getting these leads in, and I was listening to a Canadian guy who I think he'd reached about 15,000 followers on TikTok. And I thought, wait a second, is it TikTok where 17 year old girls are doing different dance moves? That was my thought in the first, in the first place. And I thought, well, if he can get on there, maybe I can get on there too. So yeah, yeah, that's how it kind of all sparked, it sparked in my head in the, in the short turn. Wow. All right. So what allowed you then to, because that is kind of the initial perception, or it has been up until recently that TikTok's for the young, the dancers, all that kind of stuff, but I know you know this very well. And for listeners, you may not be aware, but the demographics of TikTok are trending older now. Yeah. I looked at a stat the other day. I forget the exact same number, but something maybe approaching 30% of them are 40 years old. Something around the dance. So yeah, that sounds right. Okay. Help us then, because we're going to get into your numbers in a moment. Well, let's just do it right now. So you've been doing loans basically for about a year, you decided to go all in on TikTok, and I'm looking at your page, your TikTok profile, and we'll share it in the show notes and all that. But you decided to go, quote, all in on TikTok. So what I mean by this first question is then, were you trying to be the, you know, the bumblebee in head of bunch of socials, or did you go all in on TikTok? I went all in on TikTok. Now, a little bit about my background prior to becoming a broker is I have actually spent 10 years in the education industry as a high school teacher teaching, teaching secondary maths. Yeah. And then I also have a tutoring business. So in addition to that, we supply tutoring to students all the way down in grade one, all the way up to year 12, right? So my background is in educating people and teaching them, you know, how to do different, how to learn different concepts. So one of the, one of the things I wanted to apply to TikTok was, well, I just want to teach adults now how to best prepare themselves to get a home loan. And when I started consuming TikTok and realizing that it wasn't just 17 year old girls dancing and there were lots of different content creators on there teaching people about lots of different industries, really niche industries and, you know, things that I never even had thought to learn in my life, but they did it in an engaging way. So it was digestible for me. I thought, well, maybe I can do that with mortgages. And so I went all in on TikTok and I also in the past that had my own podcast or about small business a couple of years ago in Perth. And when I was promoting that podcast, I was promoting it primarily on Facebook and Instagram. And I noticed that I was putting a lot of effort into creating content on those two platforms and getting relatively low engagement. And then what I had read about TikTok at the time was that you can have no followers on this platform, literally zero. And you can experience your first post going completely viral and getting hundreds of thousands of views, whereas on Facebook and Instagram, your virality was a representation of your follower size. So I thought, I'm going to go all in on TikTok, but I'm going to approach it in the same way that I do the classroom, in the same way that I do my tutoring center. I'm going to educate. And that was kind of how it all started. Yeah, I think I always, you know, have this thing like you can't go wrong if you lead with education, you know, yeah, sure, okay, so let's get into the numbers then. So you shared with me over the DMs, but what have you closed from Instagram for loans? Total volume. Yes. Sure. So back in, so I started back in June of 2021. And then for six months, I was using it as a broker and it got to a point where I was, I was getting in so many leads because, you know, being a broker is in addition to my other businesses. So when I first started, I thought, if I could pull in one lead a month, I'd be happy. That was my initial thought process and it got to December where I was having to turn away probably 95% of the people that were contacting me because I didn't have the capacity to serve them. So I thought, this isn't, this doesn't work. I can't deal with the volume. So that's when I started to reach out to mortgage brokers all over Australia. And I said, how about I refer you these leads and I actually converted my business into more of a lead generation for other brokers because I wanted to serve as many people as possible. That was the goal, right? So the way that it works with that kind of network is I don't charge any fee to send that lead out. Like a lot of lead generation companies out there that charge you between $15 and $150 per lead. I give them the lead. If the lead goes through to closed, then I take a portion of the commission. So it's just a commission split. So since I started doing that back in January over a six month period, I received around five very close to 5,000 leads, right? And then of those 5,000 leads, we're experiencing about a 10% that are converting through to fully closed. That's the way that it's looking at the moment. So in terms of the 10% to pre-approval, which comes in roughly at around your $225 million, which is crazy. Right. It's like I've de-sensitized to it because now I've been doing it for so long, but when I say it out loud and I'm on a podcast like this, it reminds me that it was all from Tick Thug. Yeah. That was nervous laughter. I'm like, what? You want a 25,000? Are you sure? Yeah. So that 225 million is sitting in pre-approvals and then during that time, we've had 70 million of that actually draw down to closed. So that's where we're looking. And then the other thing to note on those leads is a further 30% of the total is actually sitting in our pipeline as highly likely to convert to a draw down into a close to deal in the future. So we've gone through their income versus their expenses versus their liabilities. They're in a great position, but they just need to save another 10 grand. Well, they just need to save another 7 grand. So we haven't got them on that pre-approval track yet. But that's an additional 675 million that's sitting there. Okay, people are just kind of like, I think anybody who's driving pulled off the freeway or something. And I was like, what is he saying? He slammed on the right sweat to the side. Holy shit. What? All right. So this is really cool. It's very interesting. How then do we'll get into your content in a moment, but how do most of the people that want to go to the next step? How do they engage? The DM you first, do they click this link to your form? What do they do? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly. So that link that's on my profile, my tip top page is specifically targeted at first home buyers. So when those first home buyers want to, you know, they've consumed my content, they, you know, they follow, they might be following, they might not be following. But if they want to actually go and get a home loan, they're going to click on my link. It's going to bring up a contact form, and then they fill in that contact form. And then it spit to me their, their information. It's, it's pretty, pretty much as simple as that, but there's a lot of strategies that I've put in place in order to get those customers from, from someone who doesn't follow me, to convert them into followers, from followers into leads, and then actually leads into customers. And what you'll notice there, Jeff, as you're looking through my form, is the simplicity of it. There's no drop down menu bar. You can't go to anywhere else other than that form. There's no option for you to sift through the, you know, the massive about me section or the flashing lights of the, of the web page. The simplicity is what bottlenecks them down to that subbit button. Yeah. And it's a little bit different styling wise than we typically see with a lot of the big box companies, which is like a jot form style. You know, it's a slider that moves from left to right as they fill in each section. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I like it. And for those that are listening, you can't see it, which, hey, talk about call to action. Go to the YouTube channel. You can see some of the stuff that we're sharing. Awesome. From Rob. But you said something about the strategy to get people to kind of move along the process. And that is a good segue to talk about contents. And then how do you take it from just a point of entertaining useful info to apply? Absolutely. So look, the first step is to really be strategic with the type of content that you're creating. So I like to separate mine into three pillars. So I've got my educational content, which for me is providing the most value. And then I've got my entertaining and my inspiring content as well. The educational content is like, how can I give as much value as possible? Like Gary V says, left, left, left, left jab then coming with the right hook, which is the call to action where I ask for business. And you want to give that left jab that value as much as possible. That's the goal. And I do that in my education pieces. In my entertaining and inspiring pieces, I'm showing the part of my personality that they want to get to know. It might be a little bit of humor. It might be me showing them that I know how to listen to their story. And once you've rounded out that perception from your target audience's point of view, that's the thing that's going to drive them to your profile. Now within each video that you create, whether it's educational, entertaining or inspiring, you want to make sure that there's a clear call to action. And that call to action needs to be either a driver for engagement. So what type of call to action are you going to use that's going to try and get your content onto as many eyes as possible? And then what call to action are you going to use that actually drives people to your profile? That literally will be as explicit as head to the link in my profile to get your such and such problem solved. You want to make sure that your profile is going to provide them or the link in your profile is going to provide them with the solution to the problem that you clearly have presented them. Hmm. Are you providing more than one link in the profile? In my profile, that's that one link and it's literally that contact form, right? So what I want is, yeah, your solution is to fill out that form. That's right. That is the solution. So the solution might be every video that I create that is particularly the educational based videos is going to be separated up into three key components. You've got your hook, your hook which is designed to get them to stay on your video for more than three seconds because that's the average time in which someone then scrolls away from the video. Right. You know, that's that's why we sit there, Jeff and we we look at one video, we scroll, we scroll, we scroll and then an hour and a half later, we're still on bloody TikTok, you know, look, look, look through the videos, right? Right. So you want to keep them there for more than three seconds. Then you want to present a problem that is specific to your niche, your target audience. So for me, that problem for a first home buyer might be, okay, this is how much you earn. This is your income. Get out of my way. This is your living. There you go. If this is your, that voice sounds too familiar, Jeff, if you, if you are earning a particular income and then you have particular living expenses or you might have a car loan or a personal loan or whatever it may be, then this is your limited borrowing power. However, if we make some adjustments to that and we change your living expenses and you can prove that you've adjusted your living expenses over time, then the solution here is going to be an increased borrowing power. Now, if you want support in order to get to, to get yourself over the line when it comes to getting approved for a home loan, then you can head to the link in my profile and my mortgage brokers will support you completely free of charge. So that's kind of the cool to action. So yeah, so you're kind of disclosing that upfront that you've got an association with mortgage brokers who can, you know, support you in your next step, right? Absolutely. And everything that I do in my page, it's transparent to say that what I'm doing is I'm connecting you with quite literally the best mortgage brokers in Australia because I find the ones that are specific to your situation, whether you're a first-time homebuyer, you want someone who knows all of the government schemes and grants off the back of their head. So you're best supported when it comes to getting your first home. As opposed to someone who wants to buy their first investment property, you really need two different types of brokers who are specialized in different things. So my sell point is that I find you the best one, rather than you having to go into Google and trust a Google review. And when do you kind of disclose or reveal that is it in every video or only certain videos? Only some videos, that's right because some videos I, they might be a lot shorter. So some videos might not be a whole minute educational piece of content. They might only go for four seconds. And that four second video could be not even of my face, it might be of a landscape. And it might be of me going for a walk with my wife and I've come across a beautiful field. I get my phone out, take a quick video for four, five seconds, go beauty. I'm going to use that later when I get into the office to create some content. Then I'm going to overlay some text over the top of it. I'm going to make sure that that text takes at least 12 to 15 to 20 seconds to read. So that while they're reading that text, it's going to push the video to be played four times. TikTok's going to take that information. They're going to go, oh, this person really likes that video. They watched it four times. But my strategy there is that that's how long it takes them to read the information. And then it pushes that video out to lots of people. Yeah, there's lots of little strategies and tricks you can use to drive engagement, Jeff. Where did you learn that strategy, man? That sounds pretty advanced. That one error. Well, that there right there, mate, is trial and error. So that is over the last, so since I started, I think I just cracked 1700 posts that I've done throughout that time. And a lot of that, I'm just doing these tests. And I think the second point there, Jeff, is once you gain the courage to put yourself out there and just throw a piece of content up and just be okay with it either crashing and burning, which believe me, a majority of my posts have done. You know, you find out when you throw enough stuff at the wall, Jeff, you find out which one sticks. Yeah. But you've got to keep throwing to find that out. If you do one post a week, then you're only throwing 55, 52 times a year, right? But if you do three a day, boom, all of a sudden the likelihood of five of those sticking and getting a million views each is a lot higher. So that's what's happened with me. Yeah, that's one of the questions I was going to ask you is how do you know what your audience wants? I suppose part of that is the view count. Yeah, look, there's a couple of things. Number one is the view counts. Number two is the proportion of the likes comparatively to that view count. So I like to, a lot of the time actually do a little bit of a ratio. And I'm going, okay, is it 5%, is it 10%, is it 7%, off it I'll find that there are really valuable pieces of content that run for a minute, might get much less engagement because the TikTok algorithm might not push it out as far, but the ratio of likes is much higher, which is telling me that my audience, even though it's been seen by less eyes, the people who do see it, really appreciate the value. And you've got to remember that you're creating different pieces of content for different customers in your funnel, your sales funnel. You're creating some for people that have never seen you before, what is this guy about? You're creating some as just a little bit of a teaser to go, hey, did you know about this government grant where you can buy your first home with only a $20,000 deposit? They might be people who are halfway down your funnel, but just needed that little bit of information to have the confidence to contact you to start the process. And you might have those people who are just showing resistance, showing resistance, showing resistance. So you need to prove to them that you're the type of person that they want to work with showing that side of your personality. So varying up that is really important. What kind of analytics can you get with TikTok? Because full disclosure, I am really not that knowledgeable on TikTok. So I am like on YouTube, whatever, but tell me about the analytics you get. Yeah, sure. So the analytics are based on the number of viewers, the number of likes, the number of saved to favorites. So there's a saved to favorites button. And then what people can do similar to Instagram is they can create collections within their own profile. And then they're saved videos they can categorize so they can easily come back to later. So that's an example of someone saving favorite. They can also then forward that video or share that video on and they could share it within the TikTok app or they could share it like Vera message or messenger or whatever platform that they want. They can share that video. So you also are given that stat. You're given then the percentage of people who watched the video, the percentage of them that then watched the full video. So you're given that amount, which is really interesting. For me, I like to be pushing around 20%. Somewhere between 15 and 20% of the people that see the video, I like to get to the end of the video, so the full video. And that information there is valuable because then you go, well, wait a second. How many of these people are actually getting to see my call to action? And now recently over the last couple of months, TikTok have released a graph, a retention rate graph, which is probably more similar to YouTube where you go, okay, after the first seven seconds, I've seen 20% of my audience on average drop off after the next eight seconds of the video. Another 10% have dropped off and you actually get to see it as a graph. Now you can use that information, and if you do enough pieces of content, you can go, okay, we're holding a second. Those little four second pieces of content that I create, I've got like a 90% full watch rate because they're so short, right? So it doesn't matter where I embed my call to action. But if I'm going to do a one minute piece of content, and it's a particular style that I want to use, and I look back at the analytics and see every single time I do that video, like 78% of my audience is gone halfway into the video. But what's the point of putting a call to action in at the end when you could put a call to action in halfway through and based strategic with that, or put a call to action in a quarter of the way through, and at least get that embedded and seen by a majority of the people that watch that video. Yeah, that's back to the strategy side of things. Yeah. Did it take you a while, maybe not because of your background? I'm just one, you know, as you know, one of the biggest obstacles people tend to have is like, you know, I'm not comfortable on video. I don't know what to say, what to post. That kind of did you see any of those hurdles? Yeah. Look, I did. And my very first piece of content that I released, it's back in June of 2021, crashed and burned. And if you were, if you had the time to endlessly scroll, endlessly scroll, and you'd have to scroll through a lot of videos, but I still have it up there. Since then, and since I've gained a following, more people have gone back and watched it, which makes me feel good, but at the time, you know, it got 200 views, not even, right? Like, it sat there for however, and when I was comparing it to some stats on Facebook and Instagram, I thought that was pretty good, you know, I was like, oh, 200 people, this is great. But then I was like, well, hold on, you know, that piece of content took me a while because I was trying to figure out the app and how it worked, and I was doing this all by myself writing solo. Right. And so I thought, I saw, is this worth my time, and I took a break for a couple of days, and I thought, maybe this isn't, maybe TikTok's not for me, you know, and then I posted my next, I posted my next one, and my next one I thought, oh, Rob, what are you doing? You're just going to be a teacher here and you're good to go in, and you've just got to do the same as what you would do in a classroom. So I set up the camera, I stood in front of the whiteboard at my tutoring center, and I literally with a whiteboard marker, as if I was teaching a class, and I taught, I taught to TikTok about how in Australia, a credit card limit can drastically impact your borrowing power. So I just described that to the audience, you know, it was so bad, the video was so bad that like at the end of the video, because I didn't know what I was doing, it cut off a lot halfway through mid-sentence, it didn't even end nicely, right? It just finished. And I was like, I was like, I'm not going to re-record this anyway, post, all of it. I think, I think it took like a day or two days, but it ended up on like 60,000 views. What? Yeah, and I was like, and I had at the time, I think three followers, one was my mum, and the other was my dog, and I thought, if I can get 60,000 views, with the knowledge that I had trying to promote my podcast years ago and Instagram Facebook, you know, sometimes I post something on Instagram or even Facebook, and even with my tutoring business, I'd do paid advertising on Facebook, and even then I'd still only get like, you know, I'd spend a hundred bucks and maybe get like 2000 views on a post, and I'd go, if I'm spending money there on paid advertising, and I'm getting such a limited traction, and I can organically post something for free and get all of this engagement, and I'm clicking on the people's profiles who are commenting, and they're clearly just by looking at the people in their 30s, you know, people in their late 20s. And like, these aren't 17-year-olds, these are people who want to buy homes, and they need someone on this platform to educate them about it. So that gave me the confidence early on, and over that time, I have slowly refined the way that I create my pieces of content, but the best social proof, I've recently created a TikTok masterclass where I teach people how to do this, and one of my students who is about a quarter of the way through the course, one of my students created his first piece of content two days ago. And he messaged me on TikTok to say, oh my god, I've just created my very first piece of content. Now, he used to create content back in February. He created two or three videos, and he just didn't know what he was doing at 100, 200 views. He's taken the first two chapters of my course, created a piece of content with absolutely zero followers. That piece of content now is at 130,000 views. What's the topic of it again? So what's his profile, do you mean? I think it's called walker.team.mourgages, I think that's what he's doing, mortgages also. Yeah, he's a mortgage broker, yeah, he's a mortgage broker. He's a mortgage broker up in Ontario, in Canada, and so the reason why I wanted to highlight that is because I think people, when they see my TikTok page, they get intimidated. They get intimidated by the confidence in which I have to present the information. And they go, how am I going to be able to do that? How am I going to be able to stand in front of the camera and do what he does? But you're looking at someone who, like I said, has created over 1,600 pieces of content. I've learned a lot during that time. This guy, first piece of content, applied some really simple principles and produced, to be honest, I was a little bit jealous because he got better engagement than I did over the last two days. He produced results, which were fantastic. And clearly, if you were to go on a watches video, he has a lot of work to do in terms of how he's presenting, but the idea is there. He provided value to his audience, and he did it in a digestible way that was specifically targeted on his market in Ontario. So they were like, obviously they ate it up, they loved it. Speaking of that, targeting in your market, I've read some stuff about the search coming to TikTok, meaning localized search, and of course YouTube, TikTok, all that kind of stuff competing. Now obviously, I can search generic terms, but do we have any, any comments around that kind of near me type stuff coming around? Yeah, I haven't actually applied any knowledge that I have about any search engine functions or SEO optimization on TikTok. I think that's going to be a massive future game player. For me, what I do to make sure that I'm relevant if somebody searches is I'm using hashtags, which are first of all specific to industry, and I vary my hashtags up slightly based on my information. So if I'm putting out a piece of content, which is about Australian government schemes, then you're going to find in hashtags there, some of the capital cities within my hashtags in addition to mortgages and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if I'm pushing out a piece of content, which is purely designed worldwide to gain an audience and build a following size, and I don't care if they're specific to my context in Australia, then that might be hashtags, which are just more around finance, saving, budget, budgeting hacks, those types of things, which are universal, they don't need to be specific to Australia. So I think that location based hashtags and then niche based hashtags are really important to push yourself out on the for you page algorithm, but it's also going to be important for when people start searching. And more and more people are searching every day, so you're just going to make sure you have the right words in your caption and in your hashtags. And a year ago, they used to have a very limited number of characters on your caption, but now they've turned it into more, a little bit like Instagram where there's a lot of space now that you can write. Are people searching TikTok using hashtags? Even if you've just put in the word, so let's just say you don't pretend in my comment I put in hashtag mortgage. If somebody types in mortgage without the hashtag into the search, but it's still going to populate my video. And difference. Okay. Yeah. So that's an Instagram thing, right, using hashtags to search. But you made a you glossed over a point a moment ago about the, I'm bouncing around TikTok here. I found this. You know what's so amazing, man, is like, you know, we have all these assumptions about different things in life in general, but that's in social media. And like the assumption that TikTok, you know, not really for me, not there, my audience isn't there. But then like you start in because of your reaching out to me, you're one of the reasons why I started digging deeper into this, but even just sitting here in this conversation, I started searching for mortgage related stuff. And then like kind of blown away by how many mortgage people are on TikTok with some pretty incredible followers and view counts like you were here. But there's other girl Samantha power in Canada, Ontario, 16,000 followers, 72,000 likes. I mean, and she's clearly what she looks to be, you know, probably in her mid 30s or so. Yeah. Wow. On the world. It is, it is. Even down in Australia, we're getting more and more, you know, we've probably got, I don't know, in the last six months. And I think that when you see someone like myself as well gaining a lot of popularity on the platform, it gives you confidence to go, I don't need to have 320,000 followers like Robo, the Aussie mortgage guy, I'm happy to have 10,000. In fact, I'm happy to have 2,000 followers. I'm telling you right now that you, because the thing is your following size, and like I said before, this is the beautiful thing about TikTok, is that I'll produce a piece of content, even with 320,000 followers, and I can still get 100 views. But then the next piece of content, I can get 2 million views, it really depends. But that's the same for someone with 100 followers. And that was proven by my student two days ago, getting 130,000 followers. When on that day, my best post, I think, was like, I don't know, 10,000, 10,000 views on that post, and my post on that day was the best one was about 10,000 views. So, you know, and he had zero followers, not even just the smallest following sites, he had zero. So that was just, that blew my mind, because I thought it's amazing when you write a course and you try and teach people, and you would know this, Jeff, when you try and teach people stuff, and you go, ah, I really hope that the way I've presented this works for the men, it's digestible, but to see that on his first post just blew my mind. Wow, that's really, really amazing. Um, okay, so this has been a pretty interesting lesson so far, and I'm looking at your hashtags and stuff. Look at your content. Um, I'm trying to think, what do you say are the biggest, I know you've talked to a number of people about TikTok and getting started. What are some of the hurdles or roadblocks besides the mindset thing that, like what I was thinking about with this is looking at your content, are you creating mostly on your mobile phone? Yeah, yeah, exactly right, mate. So I, and, and that's the other, the other hurdle, right, they go, no, no, no, I can't, I can't start creating content until I have my ring light. Right. No. What, go, go and stand next to a bloody window. That's, that's the thing. That's the thing. That's the side, man. There's a sunshine. Exactly. Exactly. I can't do it without my ring light. I can't do it without a brand new road wireless microphone, mate, iPhone's got a, iPhone's got a microphone in it, buddy. So what, what you need to do, and this is, and I still right now create literally 99% of my pieces of content with just my phone in my head. And, and in the course that I was talking about, my TikTok masterclass, I show you a behind the scenes, look, there's 64 learning experiences. And some are based on theory, so explaining why I do what I do, but a majority of them are practical. So what I will do is I've, I've set another camera up to the side, and I've got me sitting there with my phone just sitting in my chair in front of a window showing you exactly how I feel my piece of content, and it's just me holding my phone in front of my face, nothing dancing, speaking to the camera, right? And then I also go on to show you screen recordings of my phone and actually walk you through what buttons I press, how long I press them for, how I make the editing super simple and super efficient, because I know if you guys, you know, in America or anything like our mortgage brokers down here in Australia, the one thing we don't have is time. So we really want to make sure that it's as efficient as possible. But that there tends to be when I speak to new brokers, the biggest barrier to entry is the understanding that, you know, you don't need anything other than your phone, you just, you just create it all like that. And so I think that empowering people to see how I do it so simply, a majority of the time I'm just sitting in my car, you know, I've got two, I've got two young kids, if I try and do it at my house, there'll be screams in the background every seven seconds when somebody's, you know, fighting someone else for the new Lego blocks. So right, so I just go and sit in my car, nice and quiet, the car produces actually pretty good audio like for an iPhone speaker and beautiful light coming in from all different angles, the perfect place to do it. Where do you get your ideas then and do you batch film or tell me about that? Great. When you start out, it's important to try and figure out, I guess, first of all, what is your, who is your ideal customer? And I know that different mortgage brokers, I guess they specialize in different things. Some mortgage brokers do everything, but I think the most successful ones, they really go all in on a specific niche. So if you're trying to focus in on first time home bias, for example, if you're an experienced broker, you know the types of questions that they ask. You know the types of pressure points throughout the journey that they really need support on. So you can turn those pressure points and that journey, that customer journey into little pieces of content. So that's what I would advise you doing in the beginning. The other thing that I would, I would say, is actually create a second TikTok page and pretend that you're a first time home buyer. Sometimes, you know, when we're in our 30s or 40s and if we've got one, two or three homes, you know, we've been through the house, you know, three or the house process, three or four times, buying a home, you forget what it's like for a first time home buyer. So create a second account and actually spend 30 minutes and nights scrolling through some of the information and trying to like the type of content that you think is first time home buyer would like. What type of stuff would your customers engage with? Would they look at stuff about new home decor, for example, interior design, the aesthetic of a new home? Sometimes you start clicking on that stuff, TikTok is going to do the work for you and they are going to start pushing you out content on your, at your ideal customer avatar TikTok page. They're going to start pushing you content, which is going to inspire the content that you can create because you want to create stuff that's specifically targeted to them. As you build up your following and you do more and more pieces of content, the comments that people make, the questions that they asked, that's going to inform your content, right? So it's like a snowball effect. Once you get rolling, you just have endless ideas. And then the whole other side of providing valuable content is then you want to try and provide trending content. And that's one of the big parts that I've, one of the big strategies that I've used to build my following sizes, how can I take something that's trending on TikTok? And an example of that might be somebody might have clipped an audio from a popular movie, right? Somebody might mine over the top of that trending audio. And then they'll put some text over the top and they'll relate it to their niche. Whenever I see one of those videos, I save it to my favorite. So I put it in a collection that says potential trending. And then I go, how can I convert that? How can I convert that into something that's specific to mortgages or some or home buying or real estate? And it might be me trying to make a joke out of it or make it funny, but it's just trying to relate it to my niche. And those are the little strategies which can really kind of propel your following and push your engagement out to a wider audience is when you take advantage of trends on TikTok. And so can you repurpose that trend like you do on Instagram with audio? Yeah, absolutely. You can repurpose the trend and I'm glad that you said the word repurposed because at the moment I'm trying to push out around four pieces of content a day, right? Now to start with, that would have been impossible, that would have been crazy. I was just trying to do one piece of content a day and my goal was to do it for 60 days. And that little challenge that I set myself in the beginning was what brought me up to about 12, I think it was 12 or 13,000 followers over those 60 days was where I got to. But now I'm now I'm more efficient and I have a little bit more time to really focus on the content. I'm trying to push out four or five pieces a day, but that doesn't mean four or five brand new pieces of content a day. I try and film three and then repurpose one or two. And when I say repurpose, I find one of my old pieces of content. I read download it using a particular software to remove the watermark, the TikTok watermark. So if a new person coming in, I go, oh, this looks fresh, it doesn't look like he's just reposted up with the TikTok watermark. And then I've just maybe slightly tweaked it. So the previous one might not have had my voice in it and it might have had a trending sound or whatever it may be. It might completely decrease the volume of the old sound, add a new sound in, increase the volume on the new sound, restick it over the top of my previous call to action. So you can no longer see it, provide a new call to action based on what I want my customers to do within that moment. So that piece of content, read download, restick a new audio. It's taken me a minute 30 piece of content and some of my reposts have gotten five times the engagement of the original post, right? And I think this is their this idea that I'm pushing out old content and you know, it's people are going to get sick of it and they're not going to engage in it and it's going to get going to get no views, but it can be the complete opposite. Hmm. What was there anything surprising to you about your journey on TikTok that you didn't expect either on either side of the coin positive or negative? Ah, okay. Two things. Let's go. Shall we start negative and end on positive? Let's start with that was that was that negative. So the first thing and this is one of the chapters, one of the modules in my course and I was really passionate about this coming from the education system working with high school students is the mental health, I think, that you really need to focus on going into any type of social media platform, but TikTok in particular is as you build your following size, you need to understand that you're going to receive negative comments, right? And when you look at the proportion of those negative comments compared to the positive ones and the likes and the shares and the follows, it's so minuscule, it's so small, but of course we're humans and what do we do? We focus in on the negativity, right? And we go, oh my God, Joe from Arkansas, you know, he hated my piece of content. And he says that I'm a loser, right? And Robo down in Perth, Australia for some reason would focus on Joe from Arkansas, who cares about Joe from Arkansas, right? No offense, all the Joe's in Arkansas, by the way, but that's the one thing is I really just wanted people to, I think once you gain perspective about the proportion and about how little that happens, it helps you deal with it a little bit more, but I would be lying if I said that it doesn't impact your, pick impact your confidence and make you insecure. So that's probably the most negative thing, but if you're prepared for it and you can deal with it, it's absolutely fine. But in terms of the most positive thing, I was blown away at how quickly I became classified as an expert in my industry. It blew my mind because remember, I became licensed a month before I started creating content, right? Now, because I was creating content, I was on a really crazy learning journey of absorbing every single thing to do with the industry. And I was lucky that before I was a teacher, I actually worked for one of the big banks here in Australia in home loan lending. So I had a background, right? So it wasn't like I was completely fresh to the processes of mortgages, because I had the background, so it wasn't very challenging for me to learn everything. But still, I was new to industry. And you know, after that six-day challenge and 12,000 followers, there were so many people that were like, Robo, the Aussie mortgage guy, he knows what he's talking about. And yeah, I did, but definitely know we're near as much as a majority of other brokers in Australia. I'll tell you that much. And that was one of the other things that made me convert my business model into more of a referral agency. I was like, you know what, I'm good at mortgage broking. I'm good. I'm good at being a loan advisor. I'm fantastic at creating content on TikTok. So I'm going to double down on what I'm grading. And I know that a lot of mortgage brokers find it a challenge to generate their own leads. So that's what kind of created the business. I found the best brokers in the industry to marry up with me being the best-creative in Australia, in TikTok for mortgages. And that's kind of how that came to be. Well, yeah, very smart of you to be aware of that, right? To be in your superpower area, reminds me of a guy I know on YouTube who did a very, very same thing. He reviewed him as well on the podcast, but he started generating all these leads and then he flipped his business model to be lead gen instead of mortgage broker. Amazing. And what's great about that, though, by the way, is that really speaks to the power of brand and perception, right? And our perception is reality because what they assume is by looking at, they don't even ask, oh, Holly, you've been in the business, how many loans have you done? The assumption is, dude, that's what he's talking about. Yeah. And it's because it's confidence is key, right? You have that confidence and you're prepared to put in the time to educate. And that's the other thing is, even if people don't admit it in the moment, they appreciate free value. They can log on to TikTok completely for free, they don't have to pay a subscription. And they can consume, if they really wanted to and they sat down on my page, they could sit there for 24 hours and consume so much value completely for free. That could change their life. I've had, I've had, and this is the other point I've had, you know, people reach out like any mortgage broker and say, thank you so much, you know, and it might be for a loan advisor. Thank you so much for supporting me through the journey. I have people reach out to me and just say, thank you so much, but educating me on TikTok. I didn't think I was going to buy my first home for five years. I've done it in 12 months. Would not have been able to do it unless you inspired me and planted the seed to go out and get that information from elsewhere as well, not just from TikTok. But that's the thing is you become a change agent for these people, right? And they appreciate that value. And even if they don't turn into your customer, just the fact that they might say to their friend Sally or their other friend Bob, hey, follow this guy on TikTok, it might be Sally or Bob that turns into your customer. So it's just about creating that brand awareness. Well, I think, first of all, this has been great. Thank you for this wonderful education. We've just like barely even scratched the surface of how deep we could go with TikTok. I've learned a lot and I'm going to continue obviously to follow you and learn from you. So why don't we do this? Two things. Give everybody your profile name on TikTok, it's, I'm sorry, I got to make sure I'm on the right page. Hold on. I got too many. What is your Instagram? Your TikTok profile. My TikTok profile is trusted.finance. Okay. Great. And obviously, also your profile and some other social platforms, but we're focused on TikTok for right now. All right. The good news is though, like if you're intrigued by this and you're kind of curious, hey, I'm open to learning more on how do you do something similar on TikTok, grow a profile, grow growth leads, 5,000 leads, I love the fact that you have an educational background and you put a course together because anybody I've known who does have an educational background when they do put a course together, it's usually spot on solid because they understand how people learn, right? Yeah. And not a lot of day that out. So if you could, and we'll put a link in the show notes for those who want to learn more, but tell us briefly about your course, what somebody can expect when they click the link to go check out more. Absolutely. So the course is called convert your followers into customers, the TikTok masterclass. And basically what it is, is it's 64 modules, 64 learning experiences, separated over six chapters. Now these six chapters are delivered to students over 25 days. And that is a very deliberate, like I'm glad you mentioned my education background. There's a very deliberate strategy in that. And it's that after every chapter where I teach you, first of all, how to start your account, how to create your ideal customer avatar account, how to think about your persona on TikTok, you guys have obviously heard Jeff call me Rob, which is what a majority of people in my life call me, but on TikTok, I'm Robo, the Aussie mortgage guy. So how to dial up parts of your personality in order to suit your target audience, it starts at the very basics. But then it actually goes into the nitty gritty of how I create my content, why I create my content. And then more importantly, I've screen recorded all of the analytics behind the videos I create to show you theory, practical, and then what's the result? After we get the result on those engagement stats, I then show you how I convert into leads down through my contact form and my sales funnel. And then once we have those those leads, how my mortgage broker network actually convert those leads into customers, because I want for this masterclass to be a full journey from brand awareness to follow up to lead to customer acquisition. That's the goal. Now in between each of the chapters, there's five days and during those five days, that's where I give you tasks to complete. And it might be actually creating your ideal avatar profile and using it and actually recording some of your learning from that. In the next five days, it might be creating a piece of educational content, one piece every day and adding me on TikTok so I can make sure that you're actually doing it. So that's so that's there unless you apply it, a part of my role as because I'm still attached to a high school here in Perth, a part of my role there in addition to teaching mathematics is I'm responsible for teaching the teachers how to teach. So that's so that's my job role there as well in addition to all of this. So I haven't I haven't acute awareness of how to teach people new concepts, adults as well as high school students, how to teach them new concepts, but then how to inspire them to apply them and generate change within whatever industry they're in. Love it. Love it. I'm definitely looking forward to checking it out myself. Once again, people, if you want to check out more, the link is in the show notes. Please go check that out. And I know we're going to have to have you back, Rob, because this is again, just kind of scratching the surface and there's so much to go here. But I appreciate you getting up at six in the morning to do this podcast with you. That's it, man. I'm going to have to go back to bed now, I think. I know you at all, probably not. So again, really, really appreciate you and thank you for the kind words reaching out to me over over Instagram for the DM. I love how we're in this world now where we can connect anywhere, right? And just be like, Hey, man, you're doing cool stuff. You're doing cool stuff. And let's bring that right to to reach more people. So that's off to you for making. Yeah. I'll just ask you. Thanks. Thank you. You bet you know what to do listeners. If you'd like this episode, first of all, check out the links in the show notes. And then number two, hey, if you feel compelled, leave a review and appreciate you guys tuning in. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey guys, what's up real quick? You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before and I just want to quickly remind you of that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchased loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. 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