Author: alex

The first month of 2016 is in the books. How did you do? Were you able to improve your mindset, your business, or your numbers? For a lot of our members we sensed a change in focus and finding a marketing plan that works for them in 2016.

Across our network of real estate investor websites, there were definitely a strong number of leads coming into Carrot sites. Let’s cut to the meat and potatoes and show you exactly how many leads Carrot sites generated last month.

Last month Carrot members generated online opt in 14,212 leads. This doesn’t include the thousands and thousands of phone call leads our members have received… which takes it well over 20,000 leads per month. Those include motivated seller, rent to own, cash buyer, and a few note buyer leads.

As you can see, these numbers are up from last month’s 13,340… which we expect. 

Leads aren’t the only thing improving

We have seen a steady rise in sessions (visits) on Carrot member’s websites. As more and more members improve their SEO rankings it is no surprise that we will see more sessions.

A Quick Note: A session is a group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views. Another name is “visits”.

So what does this all mean? It means that Carrot members are effectively driving more traffic to their sites. This is awesome and is something that we will see continue on an upwards trend.

When was the last time you asked yourself why?

The last month has been crazy busy for us at Carrot. We have a lot going on and some exciting information to share with you soon. But one thing we realized in the month of January is, with all the planning, all the organization, and all the best intention in the World you really need to ask yourself why?

Why am I spending so much time on X. Why can’t I figure out how to rank for a specific keyword. Why is my site not generating leads.

Why are you doing what you are doing? If you can’t answer it quickly and with a one sentence that you are proud of, there is a good chance you need to revisit your priorities.

Why are you using InvestorCarrot? To get more leads? To have a website that performance for your business? If you said yes, great. But what are you doing to get to your why? More on that later.

We wanted to briefly shout-out some members who are seeing their websites perform for them and then break down how they got there.

Jeff was wondering why PPC Marketing wasn’t working for him on his non-Carrot website

Jeff reached out to Adrian our head Customer Success Hero of Strategy via Facebook after a Coaching Call and informed us that his Carrot site brought him his first lead. Yay! We love to see that stuff on a daily basis.

Jeff was using pay per click to bring traffic to his old non-Carrot site, but it wasn’t converting. Instead of getting frustrated, he researched InvestorCarrot, signed up and found that our pages generally convert very well for pay per click traffic.

A high performing website was the difference for Jeff

For Jeff he simply needed to find a site that converted his traffic into leads. If you are struggling with the traffic side of lead generation have you considered PPC?

If you are only using Google AdWords wait until you see what we have next.

If you are unsure of where to start with pay per click or not sure how to optimize your pay per click campaigns we recommend watching this webinar and reading this blog post.

Bryan found that Adwords isn’t the only player in the game – We added Bing PPC to the mix

Bryan is a successful and highly active real estate investors in the central part of the country. Bryan has been on a roll lately and is closing a ton of deals from his leads that he generated online. In fact he did a podcast that you should listen to where he walks through how he’s had 3 $100k months in a row recently.

Bryan’s PPC to his InvestorCarrot websites crushes it for him and constantly delivers high ROI for his business.

But just recently we sprinkled on little a Bing love into his pay per click strategies.

Bryan shared his results from that campaign on Facebook recently.

Breaking down Bryan’s success: PPC + High Performing Website

Bryan has seen mega success from his online lead generation. Now that he is closing very consistent deals every month he has a working marketing budget. For Bryan his big “why” was why not try another platform to drive traffic to my website.

Have you looked into Bing for pay per click in addition to the Google Adwords you’re running?

If not, we would recommend you do. Check back soon for a post on how to set up a Bing campaign.

Joy is making use of automating her business lead flow

Joy has been with Carrot for a couple months and was finally able to reach her first milestone (getting a lead).

We are pumped for Joy that her first lead turned into a deal. You don’t see it in the Facebook comments (and there were a lot of them).

But Joy admitted that her lead came from her PPC campaign, which she is doing herself. So if you aren’t like Bryan with a marketing budget, you can be like Joy and roll your own campaign until you get your feet under you.

Breaking down Joy’s success

Sometimes the path best traveled is the toughest one. If you are struggling with getting leads, are you asking yourself, why isn’t my Carrot site performing like these other Carrot members?

What is the answer?

Have you tried paying for traffic? Have you tried updating the content on your website? Which SEO keywords are you targeting in 2016? How did your January 2016 marketing plan turn out? If you are able to answer some of those questions you should have a better idea of what the next move is.

But we understand the answer isn’t always clear, and we are here for you. We spend a lot of time reading, testing, implementing, strategizing, and analyzing data. Utilize us as a resource to launch your business in 2016.

Here is what you need to do if you aren’t getting enough leads for your real estate investing business

If you are a Content Pro member, consider joining us for one of our weekly LIVE Coaching Calls. We host them every Tuesday at 11am Pacific. Can’t make the call? No problem, we record all of them and give you access to view them later.

• Get on a call and ask questions
• Watch 1 recording a week and find something to implement during the week
• Decide how you are going to drive traffic to your website
• Do one marketing activity this week to accomplish that goal

If you are new to InvestorCarrot here is what you should do

Don’t get overwhelmed and don’t think that if you aren’t generating leads in your first week that you are failing to do something.

The most important thing you can do is get your site set up correctly, and start implementing your game plan.

If you don’t have a marketing strategy then the first step is research how you plan to bring people to your website. If it is SEO, great, but how are you going to improve your site’s SEO? If it’s PPC, then set up your Adwords campaign and get the tracking in place.

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU:

Not sure about SEO or PPC?  Or, confused what the heck they even mean?  We break it down SEO vs PPC here…

We have an opportunity for all new members to get on a “Getting Started” call.

This is a great place to get your questions answered and have time to sit with a Carrot coach and get a strategy in place.

Are you a current InvestorCarrot member and crushing it with online lead generation? Want to talk with us about scaling up your business and or be highlighted in some of our content? Shoot us an email to support@oncarrot.com and tell us about your journey.

We’re switching up the format of our monthly Carrot Lead Harvest Reports to not just live up to our core value of transparency by showing our actual data so you can learn what’s working to generate leads online and what’s not… but we want to start to highlight real stories from investors around the country so you know what they’re doing with some of these leads that we’re reporting on each month… and how they’re Harvesting deals consistently online.

This month we’re diving into…

• The “Holiday season dip“
• How many leads our members generated and where they came from
• Highlighting Connor’s story on how he’s “Harvested” over $60,000 in new closed deals in the past 6 months leveraging the InvestorCarrot system and our guidance (awesome!)

The Holiday Season Dip (wait for the Q1 bounce!)

As we’ve written about before, the holiday season (especially when there is harsh weather like some parts of the country are seeing) sees less house sellers hitting the web to actively sell their home. More time is being spent with families and selling a house around the holidays can be tough.

However, the 3rd quarter of 2015 showed that flipping houses in general is up from this time 2014, and the total volume of leads for InvestorCarrot members in 2015 grew by a wide margin from Q1 to Q4. Check out the past months Harvest Reports to see the upward trend.

Below we dive into the places the leads came from in December… which shows you that Inbound marketing… specifically SEO and content marketing are still leading the charge by a very wide margin (studies show up to 60% of “direct” leads that Google reports are actually from Google searches).

December 2015 Real Estate Investing Lead Sources

So congrats to all of you Carrot members who crushed it in December and still had time to enjoy time off, some egg nog, and time with your family. Great way to finish the year!

With Fewer Leads In Holiday Months Are Deals Still Closing Consistently?

You bet. Realty Trac released it’s Q3 2015 U.S. home flipping report and in that report they state…

“43,197 single family homes and condos were flipped — sold as part of an arms-length sale for the second time within a 12-month period — in the third quarter of 2015, 5.0 percent of all single family home and condo sales during the quarter.”

Holy cow! That’s a lot of house flipping going on :-)

The report breaks down markets for the flips and covers more details about the report and the methodology for which the data was gathered.

Knowing that there are deals to be made, it forces you to step back and get the basics down first, and that is generating leads. It’s hard to do a deal without the lead. 

Today, we wanted to spotlight Connor, an InvestorCarrot member who was struggling to crack the first page of Google in a crowded market. We interviewed Connor and asked what he did to get to the first page of Google for top motivated house seller keywords in a hyper-competitive market, and how those results have paid off for him. 

Connor Steinbrook’s $60k Deal Harvest Story: Closing Deals In A Competitive Market

Connor is an investor in the Dallas market, which is one of the most competitive markets in the country.

Many of you reading this may be thinking…

“But if there are already Carrot members doing well in my market can I succeed too?”

Well, read this other post we wrote first, then come back here… but the answer is ABSOLUTELY YES.

Connor was brand new into the market in 2015 and got focused and implemented our system and leveraged our resources…

… and is carving out his own space in that crowded market.

The cool thing is… there were already dozens of Carrot members in the Dallas market before Connor ever entered it, but he didn’t sit back and relax and wait for magic to happen without doing anything… he busted his butt and leveraged every resource available to him here at Carrot and outworked most of the others in that market (there are other Dallas Carrot users crushing it as well!).

So let’s dive in and hear from Connor!

Q: What was your biggest problem in generating leads online at the start?

Connor: “I needed more automated leads that would come in with consistency throughout the day without taking all of my time and focus away from my daily business.”

Connor started researching real estate investing and how to wholesale properties. After trying a few methods online he realized that his biggest limiting factor was the consistency of leads.

He did some research and found InvestorCarrot and signed up a little over a year ago.

Connor: “I have closed over $60,000 dollars in deals off my Carrot Sites alone in the last 6 months”

Q: What would you attribute to your success so far?

Connor: “Hard work and following the plan. I spent 9 months studying and implementing… watching the Carrot training videos, making YouTube videos, and writing original content for every page I have. I knew it would be a lot of work so I just set goals to do a little bit every day.”

Connor attended a lot of our weekly LIVE Coaching Calls (included in our Content Pro plan), went through our trainings, and experimented a lot with is InvestorCarrot websites.

Inching up the Google rankings…

Connor says “I was nowhere to be found after 6 to 7 months within Google” for his target market of Dallas (crazy competitive and that 6-7 month timeline is expected with a fresh website in a market like that).

But after following a proven model and letting Google index his pages, he noticed he moved up to the 5th page.

From there it only took a month to get to page 3 and then another month to get up the 1st page on Google for his targeted keyword.

Connor: “The leads come in every week. The entire Carrot team is awesome. Their customer support is great. Jake has helped me every step of the way. I owe him a lot. I refer people to Carrot all the time.”

Q: How does InvestorCarrot help your business the most?

For Connor, InvestorCarrot has been fundamental for bringing a steady flow of leads. This is important for all investors, but in a crowded market like Connor’s, having a team of experts to bounce questions to and help guide him was critical.

Connor: “I even get leads when I sleep. I wake up with leads in my email sometimes. You never know when you’re going to get a text with the next motivated seller coming from your Carrot site”

Getting Real Results Requires Focused, Consistent, And Strategic Work (or outsource it to someone who will)

Reading stories like this are inspiring and awesome. We love them to.

But a key I want to hone in on here is that in competitive markets… if you’re going to focus solely on SEO and pulling in leads from Google organic search rankings… it’s going to take time and a lot of focused, consistent, and strategic work.

That’s where Connor dove right in and took the challenge head on, and we’re glad as heck we’ve been able to help him along the way to get there faster, more easily, and with a higher ROI.

Q: Do you have any advice that you would like to give other investors who are in competitive markets and want to pull in consistent leads and deals through SEO?

Connor: “It is a lot of work to get your site to the number 1 ranking. Try to not get overwhelmed.  Don’t think you have to do it all at once. Set a game plan and daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Do something every day to make your sites better. And align with experts who can be there for you every step of the way”

He is right, but all that work doesn’t need to be a burden. You have many options when getting that work done. You can break it down to small tasks, like Connor said and just make small improvements weekly. Or you can hire someone if you have a marketing budget to do it for you. You can find more information about managed SEO services in our marketplace.

The Hockey Stick ROI of SEO (when you do it right)

Connor decided to focus his time and energy on SEO, leveraging our built in SEO tools and industry leading Search Engine Optimization methodology built into our system and our training. When you implement a proven plan consistently over time your return on investment from SEO can turn into your most profitable form of marketing. We also suggest launching other ways to drive qualified visitors to your website while you work on your SEO… like PPC marketing for motivated house sellers, Craigslist, etc.

But it takes time and patience. Those who can wait are rewarded.

But the biggest takeaway from Connor’s story is this…

SEO takes time, but the ROI from it is incredibly lucrative.

If you are struggling with your SEO, not sure what to do next, join us on a Coaching Calls if you are already an InvestorCarrot member. These weekly live calls are designed to help each other out with what strategies are working, how to get unstuck, and learn other ways investors are making SEO pay out big time for them.

Don’t have access to the Coaching Calls? Consider upgrading as the overall ROI from getting 1 deal under your belt pays for your Carrot membership for 5+ years.

Congrats Connor! Let’s celebrate with Connor together! Hard work and focus pays off.

Not an InvestorCarrot member yet? Consider taking a demo or joining us today and see if it’s a fit to help you grow your real estate investing business.

By now you should be catching on with what these Carrot Lead Harvest Reports are all about. Each month we are committed to opening up our data and showing where the real estate investing leads on our platform are coming from. We love to be open and transparent, and hopefully, these numbers are as exciting to you as they are to us.

This is a great way for all of the Carrot community to keep a pulse on what is working and introduce new online marketing opportunities for real estate investors.

For InvestorCarrot members, use this as inspiration to know that what is at your fingertips with the InvestorCarrot platform, our training, and support is crushing it (in a good way) for our members… and it can for you too.

For non-Carrot members, use this as research to find out what’s working in today’s market… and get out there and implement!

A Few Quick Notes Before We Dive Into The Data

• What types of leads are they? The leads we are showing are motivated seller leads, cash buyers, rent to own tenants, note sellers and some private lenders mixed in there. The cash buyer, rent to own tenants and motivated sellers make up the bulk of the leads you will see.
• Do these leads include people who called on the phone?  Nope, the numbers you will see on this page are ONLY leads where the seller, buyer, tenant, etc. put in their information into one of our InvestorCarrot member’s websites. Right now we can’t track phone call leads on member’s websites, but from our surveys and talking with customers that is likely another 5,000-8,000+ leads per month coming in from phone calls. But for the sake of this post, we’re only going to show what we can back up by data… and since we can’t currently track phone calls our customers receive… we’ll leave those leads out for now.
• What are leads that show up as “Direct” in the stats? Great question! Google started showing a huge chunk of traffic in Google Analytics as “Direct (none)” a while back. In the past, “direct” meant that the person actually put your URL into the browser and went to your website. But now, Google is mixing in a huge number of visitors that actually came from Google searches. Some studies show that 60%+ of the traffic that shows as “direct” is actually from Organic Google search. Google just does a good job of hiding that from us for some reason. So for the sake of this post, we’re going to say 60% of the “direct” lead source is actually SEO related.

Online Lead Generation: 16,568 Seller, Cash Buyer, Rent To Own & Tenant Leads Came In During September

If you are following our monthly harvest reports you will notice September’s leads were slightly less than last month. Whenever you study data like this, you must consider historical relevance to understand what the data is actually saying.

Summer Months Are Heavy Motivated Seller Months… fall and winter dip a bit historically. As a real estate investor, you are probably aware that leads tend to get a little harder to come by in the winter months. But the seasonality of leads shouldn’t deter you from ramping up your marketing efforts.

We expect to see this trend continue through the fall and holiday months… then come January we usually see a hefty increase for cash buyer leads because investors are looking at their goals for the year and start to seek out new investment opportunities.

What does this mean to you as an investor?

Make sure you know that there is seasonality to online searches and demand… and make sure you have other types of marketing to help stack on the leads during months that are traditionally slower “seller” months.

As we expected, the lead sources are in a similar order from last month

A majority of the leads coming to our customer sites are from direct traffic, which includes Craigslist ads, SEO, and people just typing in the URL of your website. No big surprises here.

Keep using those.

But, as we’ve seen in recent months again… Facebook (mobile) and Google Adwords continue to be amazing sources of leads. The Facebook leads tend to be cash buyers or rent to own tenants as motivated sellers are harder to attract through Facebook marketing (but not impossible).

Let’s look at the real estate investing leads by state

One statistic that we always find interesting is “goal completion” by state… in less nerdy terms… leads by state.

As you can see in the picture below, the darker the blue color… the more leads were generated by our members in those states in September.

Real Estate Investing Leads By State For September

Now, remember, these are all types of leads. Sellers, cash buyers, rent to own tenant buyers, private lenders, etc.

There are lots of ways you can interpret this… but here’s what we see from it. 

The “early mover” markets like Florida, Arizona, and California are hot right now. Many sellers are jumping into the fray wanting to sell their houses and there are a lot of investors looking to buy properties in these markets.  But then you see states that have more consistently strong real estate markets that are also pulling in solid leads. Like Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Georgia, and many many more.

If we compare this against the top real estate markets to flip houses in the US in 2015 (below) you’ll see that some of this data matches up quite nicely. Also, you’ll see that in many states in our chart above that aren’t a dark blue… they are still insanely great markets to flip houses in right now. So use both our chart above with the chart below to really target in on hot flipping markets right now.

Fun Fact: 20% of last months leads came in on a Tuesday

This isn’t groundbreaking or Earth-shattering data, but it is pretty darn cool nonetheless.

We can drill down in our Google Analytics and see which day generates the most leads for our members.

What should you do with this data?

Well, you can use it to tweak some ads or be more active on social media during these times.

Try tuning your Adwords, or Facebook marketing to use more of your budget on a Tuesday and see if you can’t get a boost in leads. Also, make time to be on Twitter looking at trending topics or ways to engage with sellers and buyers on forums and Facebook discussions.

Google Analytics makes Sunday 0, so 1 would be Monday and so on.

Day Of The Week Leads Come In

As interesting as the #1 day that leads are attracted online according to our data… is also the times that the least leads come in… the weekend.

Notice that Saturday was the worse in September, Sunday 2nd worse, and Friday 3rd worse.  With the middle of the week coming in on top.

What does this mean? It gives a bit of a glimpse into the way motivated sellers, tenants, and cash buyers search. They tend to want to forget about their real estate issue on the weekends… and come mid week are reminded that they really need to get their butt in gear and make stuff happen.

So leverage this data by bumping up the activity on your social media marketing during mid-week and maybe even making sure your direct mail pieces land in their inbox mid week (test it).

How Is Your Online Lead Generation Going For Your Real Estate Investing Business?

If you’re interested in leveraging our Inbound Online Marketing platform at InvestorCarrot, our training, and our support team, take a demo or checkout our plans.

Over the coming months, we’re developing new PPC landing pages (we’re actually testing them on PPC campaigns right now), new SEO tools to help you more effectively rank in Google, and beefing up our Customer Success team to help investors… from beginners to the most advanced… leverage the web in a more effective way.