PASSIVE PROSPECTING

Real estate business owners Lascsak and Plumb make YouTube their primary marketing tool in this nonfiction business guide.

This business book tells the story of how two Dallas-based real estate agents achieved millions in sales in their first years on the job without pursuing traditional lead-generating strategies, instead building a clientele from the global audience for their YouTube videos. In the book’s first section, the authors lay out the case for YouTube’s value as a prospecting tool, backing up anecdotes from their business history with statistics and theory to explain how a video that takes an hour to produce can generate results months or years later. The second section outlines, in meticulous detail, the mechanics of establishing a YouTube channel, populating it with content, and optimizing the channel for both subscribers and search engines. In an acknowledgement of the constantly changing nature of online platforms, the book’s final chapter addresses how the pair changed their process in response to YouTube’s evolution. Lascsak, the primary author, is a strong storyteller who understands how to build an argument without overselling it—despite a few mentions of the pair’s consulting services, the book feels more like a user manual than a sales pitch. The story of the authors’ evolution into vloggers is well told, with an appropriate level of persuasive detail—they were convinced video was worth a try after discovering that a nearby suburb was searched for almost 10 times more often on YouTube than on Google. The book does a particularly good job of illustrating how providing the content that users are searching for is more effective, both financially and in terms of customer satisfaction, than traditional advertising that imposes itself without the user’s consent (“We didn’t have to chase clients, because our videos brought clients to us”) as well as being more satisfying for the creators than cold-calling or mailing postcards. The book is equally effective at demonstrating how the same principles can be applied to any industry that requires client prospecting.

A solid how-to book offering an alternative method for building a client list.