Category: Carrot Case Studies

  • $125,000/Month in Deals with Inbound Marketing and the Carrot System – Brian Rockwell Success Story

    $125,000/Month in Deals with Inbound Marketing and the Carrot System – Brian Rockwell Success Story

    Brian started his journey as a coach and a middle-school teacher. Today, he’s a top real estate investor in Dallas, Texas who’s been making well above $100,000 per month from inbound marketing (SEO and PPC) and the Carrot system.

    brian rockwell texas case study

    Brian Rockwell with Sell Your House DFW, a Carrot member for about 14 months as of the time he hopped on a call with us, has been crushing the Dallas/Fort Worth market online with his real estate investing/wholesaling business.

    Here is a recent text message he sent directly to Carrot’s CEO, Trevor Mauch…

    “6 wholesale deals this month if all goes through. $124k… 4 ppc, 1 organic, 1 Facebook retargeting. 1 has closed the other 5 are under contract with a buyer and the last one waiting on a buyer. Carrot system is still rockin’” – Brian Rockwell


    Listen in or read his story as an investor, where his leads come from, and what his inbound marketing strategy is that has led to $100k of consistent deals per month.

    [Case Study] From Teacher to $80k/Month Wholesaling Real Estate  w/ Brian Rockwell


    In high school, a friend of Brian’s introduced him to his dad. Brian’s father owned a roofing company and a few other businesses he had founded in a grass-roots sort of way. In a word, he was an entrepreneur.

    It was the first time Brian remembers being introduced to an entrepreneur of that caliber. Someone who really knew what they were doing understood how to manage money and grow a business.

    Needless to say, Brian was fascinated.

    And from that day forward, Brian wanted to be an entrepreneur.

    As time went on, he became increasingly interested in the real estate investor niché, dreaming of the day that he’d make it big.

    But, what he didn’t know at the time was that he’d have to wait 12 years until that happened.


    As Brian graduated from school and joined the sect we all refer to as family life, the importance of supporting his wife and kids rose to the top of his priorities.

    In an effort to do so, he became a track, football, and baseball coach and taught classes as well. In other words, he became a phenomenal generalist, something he wasn’t particularly passionate about.

    I mean, of course, that he wasn’t passionate about being a generalist. The coaching and teaching he loved. He was able to inspire students and co-workers daily and encourage them to be the best version of themselves that he could possibly imagine.

    Brian’s evenings, lunch breaks, and weekends, though, were filled with his dream of becoming a real estate investor and being financially free — something he wanted to do but was unsure of how to do. He would scour real estate investor resources.

    Particularly, he fell in love with biggerpockets.com.

    For 5 years, this was his life. He dreamt of being a real estate investor and studied what that could look like in his free time. But most of his time was taken up by teaching, coaching, and family.


    Eventually, Brian’s wife got a job that was capable of supporting the family, and he was free to pursue his passion.

    Through a Bigger Pockets forum discussion, he found out about Carrot and went to work creating his website.

    Listening to the 3LPD training that we offer here at Carrot, Brian learned about the importance of building credibility and personality with your website.

    So, he took extra time to add a picture of his family on the “about” page.

    Brian Rockwell Real Estate Investor

    He even added a core values section to his website after researching other businesses’ core values and determining what he felt should define his business.

    sellyourhousedfw.com core values

    Besides these small changes to his Carrot website, he did very little. He customized some of the copy to fit his voice and added compelling testimonials.

    Once his website was finished, he started marketing his new passion.

    His original intention was to market his wholesaling business with traditional methods — direct mailing and what he calls “driving for dollars.” Basically, driving the streets looking for run-down houses and sending mail to those places.

    He even got his first deal through traditional marketing methods, and he got a taste for success when he made $7,300.

    But, as Brian mentions, “driving for dollars” wouldn’t be a sustainable marketing strategy.


    As Brian grew tired of driving around every evening looking for possible clients, he knew something needed to change.

    He discovered Carrot’s 3LPD training and devoted 5 hours a day for 3 weeks to the content, ingesting every soluble potential value from the modules.

    Brian quickly learned that organic traffic strategies can take a long time to generate leads if you’re in a competitive market.

    “I’m in Dallas, Texas,” he thought to himself, which is highly competitive.

    Because of this, he turned his attention to Google Ads and learned what he knew nothing about.


    His starting budget was a mere $1,200.

    But after just one month of investing money into PPC, deals of value ranging between $10,000 and $20,000 started rolling in.

    In his excitement, he invested more and more money into his PPC marketing.

    Some might think he was too forward. But he wasn’t.

    When discussing the topic, he said,

    “Would you pay $3,000 to make $30,000? I don’t know about you, but I’d take that deal all day long.”

    Brian’s perspective was that the more money he dumped into PPC, the more money he would make and the higher his ROI.


    Brian started his journey as a coach and a middle-school teacher. Today, he’s a top real estate investor in Dallas, Texas, who’s making around $80,000 every month from his business.

    He only does online lead generation — no more direct mail or “driving for dollars.”

    Brian’s website is currently at the bottom of page one for his target keywords. And that’s starting to become a focus for him, but only now that he has the time and money to invest.

    As he discusses his success, no one is more surprised than him as he says,

    “It’s awesome because once you know the formula of how to do this, it’s just do it again and keep going and going and see how you can grow it.”

    But what’s the formula?

    How does someone go from a dreamer to a doer? How does a middle-school teacher become financially free through real estate investing?

    Lucky for you, the answer isn’t as complicated as some people make it.

    Brian boils his success down to one single solitary thing: trusting Carrot’s advice and implementing everything that they suggest.

    That might sound a little sales pitchy coming from a content marketer at Carrot, but for Brian, that was exactly why he was successful.

    He learned everything he could, took the recommended risks, and optimized his website with our suggestions.

    The results speak for themselves.


    So why not you?

    Why not your business? Why not your website? Why not your family?

    If Brian rose to real estate investing success from being a middle-school teacher, you can, too. Nothing makes Brian different than you except that he chose to implement everything he learned.

    And oftentimes, the implementation makes the difference between someone who dreams of being an entrepreneur and someone who builds a successful business.

    Brian is currently working to place his business in every city in Texas, and from there, who knows.

    When you experience the kind of unexpected success that Brian enjoys, the sky’s the limit.

    As a final piece of advice from the man who’s living your dream,

    “Trust the system. That’s what I did. I put full trust in everything Carrot had to offer. Do your research. Be good at what you do. If you don’t have the skills, go learn new skills. Always push yourself. Always learn. At the end of the day, if you find something that you want to do, go all in 100%. Just kill it.


  • [Backed By Data] What is a Good Conversion Rate for Your Real Estate Investing Website?

    [Backed By Data] What is a Good Conversion Rate for Your Real Estate Investing Website?

    You’ve probably heard the phrase “conversion rate” tossed around quite a bit over the years. And that can be a great thing if you’re testing your conversion rates… but not so good if it’s inaccurate and you follow the next “guru” advice blindly without running your tests (or for Carrot members, we do this for them).

    Carrot is one of the leading real estate website platforms. We are confident that our members generate 60,000+ leads per month through our platform and nearly 1.7 million sessions each month because we have such an extensive data set available to us from which to conclude.

    So first… let’s dive into the basics of conversion rate (specifically for a real estate investor website). Then we’ll dive into why it’s important, how to do it right, and give you a few resources we use to improve our conversion rates.

    What Is Conversion Rate?

    The “conversion rate” on your website is simply the ratio between the number of people who land on your website vs. the number of people who “convert” on your website to become a lead.

    That could be a cash buyer lead, motivated seller, tenant, or private lender.

    The “conversion rate” is pretty simple to calculate.

    If you have 100 visitors to that page and 15 of them put in their info on that page and opt-in as a lead for you, that is a 15% conversion rate.

    In other words, it’s…

    Conversion rate percentage = (Number of people who converted on your website / Number of visitors to your website) x 100

    At Carrot, we’re constantly testing our customer’s websites to see what converts visitors best.

    real estate investing website conversion

    A Test In Progress On A Carrot Members Website: This is a shot from an actual test we’re running on a motivated seller website.

    How Do You Find Out The Conversion Rate?

    There are a few ways to determine your website’s conversion rate.

    The easiest and most accurate is using a software tool… like the one we use… VWO.com (about $49/month and easy to use).

    You have to get a bit of code from the software, put it on your website (really easy to do inside a Carrot account – hit up our support if you need help), and then set up the test in the software. Let the traffic come in; it’ll tell you how many people convert as a lead.

    It may take you a few hours your first time to set up a test, and unless you’re getting 100 visitors to your website each month, it’s probably not worth setting up a test (it would take many, many months to come up with any real info because your traffic is so low).

    If you’re on a budget and are not a tech person, you can count the number of leads you had in a specific period — then look up the # of visitors in that period on your analytics and divide the two.

    *Or, if you’re a Carrot member… and you’re getting over 500 visitors a month to your site and 15+ leads a month, we’ll do your conversion rate and optimization testing for you! Just let us know through support. 

    What Is A Good Conversion Rate For A Real Estate Investors Website?

    One of the biggest misconceptions we hear all the time (and I once thought the same thing) about conversion rates from our members… is that there is a “normal” conversion rate for a website in our industry.

    I wish there were.

    But in reality… there are so many factors that can affect how many people convert on your website into a lead that a good conversion rate for a motivated seller website… isn’t a good conversion rate for a cash buyer website or rent-to-own website.

    Factors include:

    • Where the visitor is coming from before they hit your website. Are visitors finding your website organically through social media or paid ads? *Paid ad conversion rates can also be deceptive. A Google Ads campaign targeting a state or national can have different (usually higher) conversion rates compared to a local campaign
    • Whether or not your site is set up to convert well (like all of our Carrot sites are)
    • Credibility on your website… High-quality testimonials can increase your conversion rate by 34%
    • Colors
    • Your logo can sometimes make or break conversions
    • Button CTA… Changing your CTA can increase the conversion rate by 49.5%
    • The time of the year (yes, that can matter)
    • Page speed
    • and more…

    Cash Buyer Website Conversion Rates

    On one cash buyer test we ran… at one point, that website was converting almost 40% of all people who landed on the page to a cash buyer lead (picture of test results mid-way through below):

    cash buyer website conversion rate

    Cash Buyer Conversion: Results mid-way through a “split-test” on a cash buyer website for one of our InvestorCarrot members.
    That is a pretty darn high conversion rate… even for a cash buyer website (we’ve worked hard to get our Carrot websites converting high – that’s why so many people LOVE having their websites on Carrot). But later in that same test, the conversion rate settled in the mid-’20s.

    Why?

    In this case, the website didn’t change… it was mainly a “traffic issue.” She started doing Craigslist marketing which tends to yield a higher volume of traffic but a lower conversion rate.

    But on average… we’re seeing cash buyer websites (when people drive the visitor to our home pages which are geared to convert well) convert between 20-40% of visitors to a cash buyer with quality traffic.

    Motivated Seller Website Conversion Rates

    We’ve heard people ask if our motivated seller websites are converting at “25% as they used to 5 years ago,” and the answer is no, they’re not.

    5, 6, 7 years ago, before every investor on the block had a website, before 50%-60% of all searches were on cell phones (and most websites aren’t optimized for mobile). During the recession, when hoards of sellers were in dire straights and just needed out (and were willing to opt into any and every website online they could find to get out of the situation fast), the conversion rates on a motivated seller site could consistently reach 20% or more.

    And that’s a stellar conversion rate for a motivated seller website.

    But times and markets have changed a lot, even over a year, and conversion rates are a bit softer for motivated sellers.

    Sellers today have more choices regarding websites to engage with online and are pickier with who they’ll work with. They want to see a website that feels credible, that they can trust, and that is easy to use.

    So we’re seeing motivated seller websites (depending on the quality of traffic they’re sending to the site, and what they have done to their site to improve / decrease the conversion rate) convert from 7% to 20%. 20% is an outlier… and only with organic search traffic (SEO) or direct type in traffic.

    What We Consider Average For A Seller’s Website (Your Site Should Convert At Least 8-10%)

    motivated house seller website conversion rate

    Lots of House Seller Leads: This website is a highly trafficked home buyer’s website. We’re building some of our “Carrot Magic” into his website. The same stuff that’s already built into our Motivated Seller websites for our Carrot members.

    And another…

    What We Consider Solid For Sellers

    using video to increase conversion rate on real estate websites

    A Surprising Video Test: This test is on a Carrot member’s website that gets 100% of its traffic from SEO (using our 3 Lead Per Day Training). But we ran a test recently to see if a video would increase the conversion rate on her website — the result is surprising :-)

    And another…

    What We Consider Stellar (this rarely happens long-term on a website)
    during this test, this Carrot member got a GREAT stretch of quality traffic.
    The test is still early… so the rate will likely dip below 20%.

    real estate investing website conversion

    Conversion Rate: This is a shot from an actual test on a motivated seller website.

    All in all, you should shoot to have your motivated seller website convert at least 10% of your visitors to leads at a minimum… and work your way toward a 15-20% conversion rate (for a quality lead) on the top end in today’s environment with building solid credibility on your website, great quality traffic.

    In a recent conversion test on motivated seller sites, we also found a potential 55% conversion rate increase by making one simple change to the hero section.

    hero conversion rate increase

    Conversion Rate: Hero sections that increased conversion rates by anywhere from 25 to 55%

    Rent to Own / Tenant Buyer Website Conversion Rates

    Rent-to-own tenant buyers and tenants of rental properties tend to convert pretty darn well when they land on a website set up to convert (like our Carrot sites are).  A tenant (or even buyer) tends to be putting in their info on your site to see available properties… so it’s a much lower commitment than a seller’s decision to sell their house to someone.

    A Solid (But standard on Carrot) Conversion Rate For a Rent-To-Own Site

    conversion rate on a rent to own website

    Rent To Own Leads Flowing In: In this test on a rent-to-own website of a Carrot member, you can see in the early stages of the test their site is converting on average close to 40%. This isn’t out of the norm on our rent-to-own websites.

    Our rent-to-own websites have been performing well. After several rounds of testing (and we continue to test and improve these sites for our customers each month), we tend to see tenant buyers converting between 20-40% on the website.

    One member’s website even had a string of several months (and several hundred leads) where their site converted nearly 50%. Their traffic was very high quality coming from a Facebook campaign.

    Summing Up The Basics Of Conversion Rates For Real Estate Investor Websites

    Improving the conversion rate of our Carrot platform is something we love to do, and it’s fun.

    We’re running 50 tests on our Carrot member’s websites… actively working to improve the conversion rate of our platform every month. We do the same thing for our real estate agent websites, too!


    Hit Me With Your Conversion Rate Questions Below!

    So… do you know the conversion rate on your website? If so, hit me with a comment below!  If not, hit me with your URL, and we’ll look at your site and give you some feedback.

    And as always, if you feel Carrot may be a fit for your real estate websites and want better results online, we’d love to have you in the Carrot community. Check out our plans and hit us up with questions anytime!

  • This Real Estate Agent Doubled Her Closings + Increased Website Traffic By 227%

    This Real Estate Agent Doubled Her Closings + Increased Website Traffic By 227%

    Fox Realty Group, Increases Closings by 100%

    Shemeika Fox is a real estate agent in Santa Cruz. She’s marketing her business in ways that most real estate agents never even consider, and because of that, she’s cutting through the clutter in her competitive market. Since implementing Carrot and an Inbound methodology, Shemeika’s web page views increased by 227% and their closings have increased 2x.

    Recently, she joined us on the CarrotCast to discuss her journey through our 30 Day Challenge, which has helped her take her market authority even further. She is quickly ramping herself up to be the leading real estate expert in all of Santa Cruz!


    In 2019, Shemeika Fox doubled her number of closings. But it wasn’t by sheer luck… it was by clear-cut strategy and intentional action.

    She’s marketing her business in ways that most real estate agents never even consider, and because of that, she’s cutting through the clutter in her competitive market.

    Just before that success, though, Shemeika was tired and frustrated — she was on the hamster wheel of business, sweating for every single lead.

    She knew something needed to change.

    And that’s when she made these five key shifts in her thinking and her marketing.

    1. Mindset Shift: From Hunting To Farming

    Entrepreneurs are great at getting up early and working late.

    There’s a ceasless motivation that drives entrepreneurs, and while that’s an important quality for success, it’s also not sustainable.

    Ask any ex-entrepreneur why they got a day-job and they’ll probably tell you that they worked too hard and too long for too little payback.

    That’s because most entrepreneurs hunt for their closings.

    They pay for advertisements, ask for referrals, send direct mail, follow-up, and cold call. But here’s the thing: the moment that you stop doing those things… the leads stop flowing. Which means that the only way to generate more leads or to keep generating leads at all it to keep working harder and longer… to keep hunting.

    But what about a farmer?

    A farmer is different than a hunter. They plant seeds, nurture those seeds, and then reap the benefits of their careful attention.

    less-work
    All of the lines on the left are equal to the length of the line on the right, but more progress is made when focus is put in just one mission-critical direction.

    Sure, it takes more time to see the results, but the harvest is much more plentiful and, in terms of ROI, it requires much less work per closing.

    Farming strategies include SEO, buliding brand awareness, and content marketing… all strategies that most real estate agents neglect.

    Now we’re not saying that you should stop running ads or sending direct mail, but you should be farming and hunting for your leads.

    Hunt for leads when your business needs them immediately, and farm when you can allow a bit more time for results.

    This was an important mindset shift for Shemieka to make and it’s important for all entrepreneurs.

    Harder work is not the only way to generate more leads or grow a bigger business. Like the cliche goes, work smarter, not harder.

    For Shemieka, that means consistently running ads and sending direct mail, but also spending plenty of time building her online brand image, posting content to social media, and growing her SEO presence.

    2. Simple, Effective Lead-Generation Website

    Building an effective website is one of the most difficult parts about building a real estate business.

    You need one because everyone else has one… but how do you get that website to actually be useful and generate leads?

    And in order to get the functionalities and features you need to get your website generating leads on autopilot, how do you build that without spending thousands of dollars on a custom design?

    For Shemeika (and for more than 7,000 real estate pros around the nation), Carrot was the answer.

    Before signing up with Carrot, this was Shemeika’s website.

    It might look pretty, but the problem is that it wasn’t generating leads for Shmeika’s business, no matter how much traffic she drove to the site.

    That’s why she signed up with Carrot.

    Here’s her new website.

    And guess what?

    People don’t just visit that site… they opt-in, they contact her, and those leads turn into closings.

    In fact, her website brings in so many leads that, in 2019, she doubled her number of closings.

    Why?

    Well, the genius of our Carrot methodology is in giving your website traffic exactly what they want. First, people tell you whether they want to buy a home or sell their home.

    If they want to buy, then they can immediately start browsing through your listings — if they find something they like, they just have to dial the number in the upper right corner of your Carrot site!

    If they want to sell their home, then they’ll be taken to this page which is designed to get them in contact with you as soon as possible.

    And the conversion rate on Carrot sites is higher than any other website builder in the industry, which means more leads, more often.

    This was a fundamental shift for Shameika. In her own words,

    “Carrot has impacted my business so positively! I love the property websites, landing pages, the SEO rankings, blog and over all design of the site. I also love the landing pages that i use to drive traffic from ads that I run. And my favorite is to watch the increase on Google rankings with the more relevant content we produce. Really great web host!”

    3. Focus On Blog & SEO

    One thing we’ve found that separates top-performing real estate agents from everyone else is a focus on search engine optimization.

    And that makes sense.

    Because if you rank on page one for a search phrase that is getting attention every single month, then you’re going to get a lot more website traffic and lot more leads than your competitors.

    And by focussing on SEO, you won’t just get more leads, you’ll also get higher quality leads.

    Our members have found SEO leads to be about three times higher quality than leads from paid advertisements, which means it takes about three times less leads to actually close.

    The reason for that is simple.

    With paid advertisements, you’re interrupting people who may or may not be intersted in your service.

    But with SEO, interested people come searching for you.

    So the question becomes, how can you build your SEO rankings?

    Well, we’ve designed Carrot to help you do just that… and here are some of the features we offer that you’ll definitely want to take advantage of…

    Ranking Tracker — Our ranking tracker will keep an eye on how your website is performing for certain keywords in Google. Just enter the keywords that you’re trying to rank for and our ranking tracker will do the rest, giving your regular updates on your website’s SEO performance.

    SEO Tool — Whenever you’re designing a page of your website with Carrot, just scroll to the bottom to find our SEO Tool, which will automatically scan your page for search engine optimizations and give you a checklist of what you still need to do. Once the light is green, that means you’re good to go!

    Monthly Blog Posts — If you sign up for a Content Pro or Advanced Marketer membership, then we’ll also provide you with blog content for your website every month that is customized for your market and written to rank for a specific high-value keyword in Google. Just publish the content every month and you’ll give your website a better chance of ranking!

    VideoPost — One of Shemeika’s favorite things about her Carrot site is the ability to use a feature that we call VideoPost. This tool allows you to upload and trascribe any video into a long-form blog post for your website that can help you rank in Google. But instead of writing the article, you just upload your video and we’ll do the rest. This is a great way to quickly and easily create SEO content for your website.

    4. Advertisements & Landing Pages

    When we asked Shameika what her favorite thing about Carrot was, she mentioned that she loves being able to quickly and easily create landing pages that she can then drive paid traffic to.

    With Carrot, you can create a new landing page with just a few clicks.

    You can then customize that page however you want.

    You can turn it into a sales page with an opt-in form, testimonials, and even a credibility bar… or you can turn it into a long-form blog post.

    The choice is yours.

    But one of the best ways to make use of this feature is to create a new landing page for each specific market that you’re advertising to… and then to drive that traffic to that page.

    You might, for example, create a page for people who want to buy river-front homes, or a page for people who want to sell a home for over $500,000, or people who just want to learn more about you as a real estate agent.

    Remember, the riches are in the niches.

    And with a Carrot site, you can easily create a sales page for each niche that you operate in.

    Here’s a Facebook ad that Shameika is currently running…

    And here is the page that advertisement will take you to if you click.

    See how the advertisement seamlessly flows into the landing page?

    That’s how it should always be.

    It should feel like one cohesive experience rather than two separate experiences.

    And by leveraging the versatility of Facebook’s targeting and Carrot’s landing page builder, you can create a seamless experience for buyers and sellers in any niche or market.

    Here’s one more example…

    And here’s the landing page…

    Shameika skillfully attracts her target market with Facebook ads and then gives them what they want most on the landing page.

    In return, she gets their contact information and can then add them to her email list.

    Or maybe she’ll be able to start working with them right away. Whatever happens, this is a great strategy for generating leads.

    Create more landing pages for more niches and markets… and use advertisements to drive targeted traffic.

    5. The 30-Day Challenge

    What if you could take a system that’s proven to generate high-quality leads — a system that has made hundreds of investors and agents around the nation millions of dollars — and implement it right into your business in just 30-60 minutes per day over a 30-day period?

    Sounds too good to be true, yeah?

    Well, that’s the exact system that Shameika went through… and it helped to unlock her business’ full potential.

    We call it our 30-Day Authority Building Challenge [CLICK HERE TO JOIN].

    In it, we walk you through how to brand your real estate business, how to drive traffic, and — most importantly — how to get high-quality leads (and even how to obliterate your best month’s lead-gen record)

    At Carrot, we’ve helped countless real estate pros beat their most aggressive market competitors, generate more than one million leads, and build businesses that support themselves and their families.

    Over the last few years, we’ve learned a lot about what real estate marketing tactics work… and what doesn’t.

    And we thought to ourselves…

    “What if we created a tried-and-true, fool-proof lead-gen system for agents and investors — a system that would help our members become the go-to experts in their market, drive leads passively to their website, and build the business of their entrepreneurial dreams?”

    This challenge is helping people even more than we could have imagined…

    One of our long-standing members, Chris Wojciechowski, said he wishes we would have created this challenge 3 years ago!

    Carrot 30 day challenge success

    So…

    Are you ready to create a marketing system for your real estate business that generates leads like clockwork, that makes your business more predictable and sustainable?

    Moreover, are you ready to spend just 30-60 minutes per day over the next month to make it happen?

    Great!

    Conclusion

    What are your goals for 2020?

    Do you want to generate more leads, do more closings, and grow your revenue?

    Do you maybe even want to double the number of closings you do this year?

    Well, we can no longer count on one hand the number of Carrot members who have taken their businesses to the next level.

    There are many stories just like Shameika’s of agents and investors who have used online marketing, SEO, Carrot, and advertising to beat their competition and build the business of their entrepreneurial dreams.

    It is possible for you as well.

    You just need the right tools.

  • Carrot Success Story: How Ben Lovro Wholesales 5 Deals Per Month (11 Lessons You Can Use Today)

    Carrot Success Story: How Ben Lovro Wholesales 5 Deals Per Month (11 Lessons You Can Use Today)

    How do you build a thriving real estate investing business? That’s the question we consistently try to answer here at Carrot.

    Ben Lovro, Founder of EN-VISION HOME SOLUTIONS, and Carrot member from South Carolina hopped on and walked us through how he consistently does 4-6 deals per month.


    Ben has been a Carrot customer for a few years now, and he is someone we’ve have wanted to have on our podcast for a long time.

    His story and transformation are nothing short of incredible. It’s not just a story of becoming a real estate investor or building a business. Ben’s story is about perseverance and overcoming the obstacles that life throw can throw our way.

    We’re excited to share with you his story (from five years in prison to five deals per month), his processes, and his tricks for maintaining a positive mindset.

    Here are the main ways he’s been able to build his success.

    Watch the full success story…

    From 5 Years in Prison to 5 Deals a Month Wholesaling, Here’s How Ben Lovro Does It

    11 Simple High-Impact Lessons to Become a Successful Real Estate Investor

    1. “You Can’t Microwave Success”

    During the interview, Trevor asks Ben…

    “Do you ever just want to quit?”

    Ben sort of laughs to himself and says…

    “More times than I can even tell you about.”

    And he goes on to say something really powerful…

    “You can’t microwave success.”

    That is, there’s no shortcut for building a successful real estate wholesaling business.

    You’ve got to show up, do the work, and show up again tomorrow.

    This stuff often takes longer than you want. But if you’re faithful to proven strategies and processes, then you will succeed… it’s only a matter of time.

    But remember, there’s no way to cut corners.

    If you’re in the midst of a grind, just know that you are making progress and that that progress will pay off sometime in the future. It might just feel like cold, hard work right now… but this season won’t last forever.

    Stay the course… and you’ll reap rewards down the road.

    2. Begin With The End In Mind

    Why do you want to build a real estate business?

    Many new real estate investors or agents are in it for the money… or the sense of freedom that they can acquire.

    And that’s great but it’s probably not clear enough.

    If you’re going to succeed in the long-term, then you’ve got to know why you’re doing what you’re doing.

    Because here’s the thing: it’s going to be tough sometimes. And if you don’t have a really compelling reason for building your business, then you’re probably going to quit.

    So why are you doing it?

    • Do you want to make a positive impact on the people around you?
    • Do you want to lead others?
    • Do you want to provide for your family?
    • Do you want to have more freedom for the things that really matter in life?

    This is a lesson that Ben originally learned from reading The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People and it’s stuck with him.

    Whatever your ultimate goal is, write it down and remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing every single day.

    3. Read Like Crazy

    It’s no secret that consistently reading non-fiction books can make a big impact on your mindset and by association, on your business.

    (Because YOU are leading your business…)

    So here’s a question for you: are you reading consistently?

    Ideally, you should read at least a little bit every day.

    You should read books that challenge your mindset, books that make you think about business differently, and books that teach you practical strategies for being successful.

    The more you read, the more successful you will probably be — in fact, it’s kind of hard to not become successful if you read like crazy.

    So in some ways, this is a shortcut to becoming the person that you want to be and building the business of your entrepreneurial dreams.

    Read, read, read.

    Two books that Ben mentions are The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People and Rich Dad Poor Dad. If you don’t know where to start… maybe start with one of those.

    4. Use A Winning Website

    It might seem a little silly… but the website you’re using can have a big impact on whether or not your business is successful.

    Or at least, how successful your business is.

    Ben started with a basic website provider but received sub-par results.

    It wasn’t until he switched to Carrot, that he started seeing massive results.

    He started generating more leads.

    He started closing more deals.

    And after 6 months of consistently working on his SEO, he ranked position number 1 for his target keyword phrase in Google.

    Now, he attributes a ton of his success to his Carrot website and to his SEO efforts.

    If your website is built to win… your business will win as well.

    You can sign up to get a winning website risk-free for 30 days over here.

    Who knows? Maybe that’ll be a game-changer for your business as well!

    5. Delegate As Early As You Can

    Many entrepreneurs are nervous to start delegating, to start hiring, and to start trusting other people to manage parts of their business.

    That’s understandable, of course.

    Your business is your livelihood… and the last thing you want is for someone else to mess up what you’ve got going.

    But here’s the thing: not delegating is always one of the best ways to hamper or slow your own success.

    By trying to continue as a one-man show, you limit how large your business can grow and you put yourself at a much higher risk for burnout.

    You know all of those things that have to be done but that you hate doing?

    They’re different for everyone — maybe you hate cold calling, maybe you hate acquisitions, or maybe you hate sending direct mail. Whatever the case, those things that you hate doing are going to burn you out if you don’t delegate them soon.

    You should focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.

    And the good news is that you can actually start delegating pretty early in the life of your business.

    Ben started by hiring someone to help him with cold calling so he could focus on growing his business. He went to UpWork and hired someone who’s now been with him for several years.

    When it comes to hiring people on UpWork (which is an awesome platform), Ben offers some advice…

    • Try to weed out 90% of people — Most of the people who apply for your job aren’t going to be very committed. Try to weed out people by asking them to do very specific tasks during the interview process and then watch to see who does what you asked. Eventually, you’ll have just a few promising applicants to choose from.
    • Ask people why they’d be a good fit for your business — Ben encourages you to ask applicants why they think they’d be a good fit for your business. Do they have past experience? Are they consistent? Are they loyal? These are the kinds of things you’re trying to find out.

    As time goes on, you’ll be able to hire more and more people by reinvesting your profits into your business.

    Ben has two cold-calling people and an Acquisitions Manager, now.

    The sooner you start delegating, the faster your business is going to grow.

    Related Content: Guide To Cold Calling Motivated Sellers (+Free Scripts!)

    6. Don’t Put Everything Into Your First Deal 

    Starting to build a real estate investing business can be tough… especially when you’re trying to land your first deal.

    It’s not uncommon for a person’s first deal to go a bit askew.

    Maybe they don’t make as much money as they thought they would, maybe they can’t find a buyer, or maybe the deal falls through.

    It’s important to mentally prepare for those possibilities because if they happen (and they very well might), you need to keep going.

    Remember: one failure does not equal future failures.

    In fact, those failures are usually an important part of the learning process.

    So embrace them, prepare for them, and do not sink everything you have into your first deal.

    7. Use Our 3-Lead-Per-Day Training

    What if you were getting 3 leads through your website every single day… without running paid traffic?

    That would be pretty awesome, yeah?

    Well we created our 3 Lead Per Day Training to help you do just that — and it uses a little thing we call SEO.

    Basically, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is tactics and strategies for getting your website to rank in Google so that when someone types in “Sell my house fast in [YOUR CITY]” or something similar, they go to your website and give you a call.

    From what we’ve seen, this is the most game-changing marketing strategy for real estate investors and agents.

    Many of our members get 5-10 leads per day just through SEO!

    And in this training, we show you how to do that!

    This training is so simple that you can just hand it to a Virtual Assistant that you hired on UpWork, ask them to go through it and follow it step-by-step… and they’ll know how to optimize your website to rank.

    In fact, that’s exactly what Ben did with his VA.

    He went through this training himself. Then he handed it to his VA and he never had to worry about SEO again… but he’s getting inbound leads like crazy.

    Which brings me to the next lesson.

    Here’s why you should try to lean toward inbound marketing.

    Related Content: The Beginners Guide to SEO for Real Estate Strategies, Tips, And Examples

    8. Lean Toward Inbound Marketing Leads

    Paid advertising can me a major part of your business’ success.

    Within a few days, you can run Facebook ads, send direct mail, or use PPC to generate leads.

    And while some of those leads might be tire-kickers, they are still leads. Ben’s close rate, for example, on leads from paid advertisements hovered around 1 in 60, which isn’t unheard of depending on the strategy.

    Most real estate investors, though, explain that inbound marketing leads are much higher quality. Some report getting a 1-in-10 or 1-in-15 close rate.

    But what is inbound marketing?

    Well, let’s first talk about outbound marketing.

    Outbound marketing is paid ads. You go pay to interrupt people’s online experiences… and some of those people are, by happenstance, interested in what you’re offering and they click on your ad.

    But because those people aren’t looking for you when they find you, the quality of those leads is relatively low.

    Inbound marketing, on the other hand, what we specialize in here at Carrot.

    Inbound marketing for real estate is a strategy that focuses on attracting leads from your content. Basically it’s when a lead comes looking for you rather than vying for their attention.

    The most common way this happens is that someone types into Google something like “Sell my house fast in [MARKET CITY]” and they stumble across your website… then they give you a call.

    Because those people came looking for you, they are more motivated and they are far more likely to turn into a closed deal.

    However, SEO takes a long time to get going.

    It took Ben 6 months until he got to position number one in Google for many search terms and two for many other — but once he did, it was well worth the wait.

    Ben Lovro organic ranking number one for carrot member

    That’s why we recommend investing in paid ads to keep your business moving, but investing in SEO over the long-term so your lead-flow will be more predictable and sustainable.

    Outbound marketing can support your business now but inbound marketing can support your business for years to come.

    9. Understand The Difference Between Different Temperature Leads

    Not all leads are created equal.

    Some leads… you don’t even have to negotiate. They tell you how much you want, you pay them that amount, and you’ve got a closed deal.

    Some leads want to negotiate with you for a while. They want a price that you can’t afford, but you follow-up with them hoping that they’ll change their mind.

    And some leads just aren’t super motivated. Sure they are sort of interested in your service… but they aren’t even close to ready to make a commitment.

    It’s very important to understand the difference (and value) of each of these kind of leads.

    Hot leads, warm leads, and cold leads.

    Because once you understand that your business is generating different kinds of leads, you can serve each lead appropriately and make the most of each.

    Hot leads… answer their call, close quick, and make the process as painless as possible.

    Warm leads… negotiate with them, listen to their concerns, help them however you can, and DEFINITELY follow-up consistently.

    Cold leads… stay in touch with them but don’t invest too much time chatting with them. You should keep them on your emailing or calling list and follow up every other month or so.

    The point is… treat every lead how they want to be treated and your business will grow faster.

    10. Create a Morning Routine to Control Your Day

    Ben also understands the importance of having a morning routine.

    As entrepreneurs, it’s easy to get lost in the busy-ness of the day the moment you wake up. Maybe you try to rush out the door to get to important tasks as soon as possible.

    That makes sense… you’re busy.

    But you can’t neglect your morning routine.

    According to Ben, you’ve got to take immediate control of your day by meditating, reading, and even watching an inspiring YouTube video every morning.

    This will set you up to conquer the day and do your best work.

    And what’s the point of putting a ton of work into your business if it’s not going to be your best work?

    So start your day off right and take even just 15 minutes to take care of yourself and get inspired.

    Related Content: Download the Daily Habit Tracker

    11. Let Impact Drive You

    Why are you building your business?

    You probably want to create more freedom for you and your family.

    You probably want to make lots of money.

    But do you also want to impact others?

    Trevor and Ben talk about how money becomes boring after a while and will only drive you so far in your business, but making an impact will always drive you. That is, wanting to help others and leave your legacy on the world.

    It might seem silly, but one of the best ways to grow your business is by caring for others and doing your best to leave a positive impact on your clients.

    Related Content: Carrot’s commitment to making an IMPACT

    Now Get Busy

    Kathryn Orford said…

    “Sometimes our biggest nightmare turns out to be our biggest gift. And it all comes down to our attitude. Life will throw us curve balls and disappointments, even heartbreak. But ultimately we can choose if we’re going to be bitter or better for the experience.”

    Ben not only has chosen a better experience, but he has also crushed it! Now it’s time for you to lace up your boots and get to work. Get organized. Get a strategy. Get healthy.

    We’ll leave you with some questions…

    Why are you proud of the business that you’re building or have built?

    What have you learned along the way?

    Let us know in the comments and let us know how this interview benefited you! :)

  • EP 193: How This Real Estate Agent Doubled Her Closings In A Highly-Competitive Market In Just One Year w/ Shemeika Fox

    EP 193: How This Real Estate Agent Doubled Her Closings In A Highly-Competitive Market In Just One Year w/ Shemeika Fox

    How This Real Estate Agent Doubled Her Closings In A Highly-Competitive Market In Just One Year

    Find your authentic self and go for it. Don’t be afraid to be different.

    Shemeika Fox

    Shemeika Fox isn’t your run-of-the-mill real estate agent. She is a strategist, who knows exactly how to position herself where people are looking. By being relentless, focused, and genuine, Shemeika has been able to DOUBLE her closings in a highly-competitive market, in just one year! 

    Recently, Shemeika completed our 30 Day Challenge, which has helped her take her market authority even further. She is quickly ramping herself up to be the leading real estate expert in all of Santa Cruz!

    By finding the right clients for her avatar and expressing her true personality through informative and entertaining advertising, Shemeika is creating the business and the life she has always dreamed of.

    Most importantly, she is the happiest she has even been in her career.

    Read the Full Show Notes Below…


    How This Real Estate Agent Doubled Her Closings In A Highly-Competitive Market In Just One Year w/ Shemeika Fox

    Authority. You’ve heard me talk about it time and time again on this podcast, during whiteboard sessions, and maybe even on a one-on-one coaching call. The real estate industry is competitive and with changing technology and the rise of iBuyers, agents and real estate investors must find ways to set themselves apart and showcase the unique services they are able to offer their clients. 

    Shemeika Fox was part of one of our recent 30-day challenges and what she is doing with her business really stood out. When the challenge first started, she was already a few steps ahead of the game as she had previously utilized our concierge service to get her website up and running. Now, she has taken what we provided and ran with it. She is creating memorable content that you aren’t going to find anywhere else. 

    Generic Marketing Leads To Generic Clients

    Until 2019, Shemeika was using a marketing strategy many agents use. She had a broker-powered website, a few advertised listings, standard mailers, and spent a lot of her time on the phone.

    Shemeika was tired of chasing leads and wanted to position herself so that people would come to her. While she has always loved what she does, she knew that she was capable of more. She knew that her unique talent and ability could help a lot of people on their real estate journey, she just needed to learn how to attract them. 

    In 2019 Shemeika asked herself who she could best help. She set an intention to reach these clients utilizing marketing that came from the heart. This led to more leads that matched her ideal client avatar, and more importantly, the ability to find true joy and fulfillment within her business. 

    Making The Marketing Shift

    In 2019, Shemeika got herself a Carrot website and utilized our concierge service to help her get her message across. She hired someone to help her with her marketing full-time, as well as a professional videographer to create some of the most clever and entertaining listing videos we have ever seen. 

    Today, Shemeika’s website promotes the Santa Cruz community she is so passionate about, local businesses she loves, how she and her team are giving back, all while showcasing her personality and mission.

    People can get to know her before they even call the office, making it much easier for her ideal clients to find her instead of the other way around. She isn’t out there, solely talking about all the houses she has for sale. She’s focusing on all of the community stuff that really pumps her up and gives her energy within her business. 

    Shemeika is passionate about giving back to the community and helping other entrepreneurs in the Santa Cruz area. She co-hosts a women’s group that provides guest speakers as well as opportunities for networking. 

    Getting Off The Hamster Wheel

    Over the past year, Shemeika has made a clear shift in her mindset and marketing. Her focus has changed from hamster wheel marketing to content pieces that will be evergreen. She provides community information, features local businesses, and sometimes finds herself talking about subjects that have nothing to do with real estate. And while she does do listing videos, there is nothing boring or ordinary about them. 

    Recently, Shemeika created a video for a listing using a spoof on the Freaky Friday movie, which featured the owner’s daughter and helped to quickly sell the house for much more than the asking price. Another recent listing featured a bee theme to showcase a bright and sunny yellow house. Shemeika’s videos are memorable, unique, and also show that she has fun in her career… something each and every one of us should be striving for! 

    Join us on our next 30-day challenge! You’ll learn how to refine your marketing and find real joy in your business! 

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    We want to hear your thoughts on the podcast! Drop them in the comments section below or hit us up on Facebook or Instagram!

  • EP 186: Carrot, Fix my Business! Behind The Scenes Strategy Session w/ Real Estate Investor + Agent, Robert Grand

    EP 186: Carrot, Fix my Business! Behind The Scenes Strategy Session w/ Real Estate Investor + Agent, Robert Grand

    Carrot, Fix my Business! Behind The Scenes Strategy Session w/ Real Estate Investor Robert Grand

    Hey Guys and Gals!

    Today we are doing something a little bit different for this episode of the CarrotCast, we decided to do a 45-minute business teardown where we hop on with an agent or investor and unlock the biggest pain points in their business, so you can get a behind the scenes look at the journey of someone just like you and find out what it takes to get on the fast-track to success.

    We sat down with Robert Grand, owner of Grand Realty and Eugene House Buyers to take a look at his business and his websites and how they could be improved. I do 3-4 of these calls each week, but have never recorded one until today! 

    We touched on some exciting topics including easy tips for content creation, creating a follow-up system, and restructuring deals to better capitalize on leads. Listen in as we breakdown Roberts’s business and discover ways to help him and his team find massive success, thus creating a major community impact in 2020. 

    Read the Full Show Notes Below…


    Carrot, Fix my Business! Behind The Scenes Strategy Session w/ Real Estate Investor & Agent, Robert Grand

    If you are an investor or an agent, you will want to do all you can to maximize your marketing efforts. With a few small tweaks and additions to your site, you will be able to create credibility and gain traction in your SEO efforts. 

    Robert Grand is a former firefighter who has been a real estate agent since 2012. Together with his partner, he runs a traditional real estate agency, a property management company, and does investments. Robert has two sites with us, one for Grand Realty and another for Eugene Housebuyers. We did a quick rundown of each, providing some tips to really make the site stand out and grab the attention of potential clients. 

    Eugene House Buyers

    Eugene House buyers is set-up with the Hemlock theme. I always advise Carrot Clients to do a quick google search of words they want to rank for and take a look at any of the Carrot sites that pop up. In order to stand out, you’ll want to do something a little different with your theme, content, and message. 

    The site looks good and has a great local picture. The CTA stands out and matches with the company’s branding. Your call to action should always stand out, being one of the first things people see when visiting your site. 

    The content doesn’t appear to be updated from our stock content, which is ok, but it may not be so great for SEO. I always advise clients to go in there and tweak a few things to make it more personal. Ideally, 100% of the content should be different, however, just by editing 30-50%, Google will recognize it as unique content. 

    Updating the About page is extremely important. It provides a connection between you and your potential clients. You’ll want to make it personal, showing who you are and what you do. And of course, you should have a few pictures! On the realty side, Robert has a great about page, I suggested he grab some of that content and bring it over to the investor side. 

    Follow-up is another issue we addressed. If someone wasn’t interested in the cash offer, they were just letting the lead go instead of referring them over to the realty side. If you offer both services, be sure to provide dual offers and options for your clients! Robert left about $100k on the table last year just because the wasn’t passing the leads to the reality side. 

    Testimonials are great for your website but there are a few things you can do to make them even better. First off, if possible use full names as opposed to just initials. Try to include a photo with yourself and the client or better yet, get a video testimonial. If you aren’t able to achieve either, take a pic of the house, even a screenshot from Google maps will do if you aren’t able to drive-by. 

    For both sites, I advised Robert to get his Facebook retargeting set-up. I consider this another form of follow-up as you will be able to keep hitting those potential clients with new content every day. 

    Video, video, video. You hear me talk about this a lot, but including a video, with your face, will help you to get more leads and close more deals. Talk about what you can offer, who you can help, and why you’re doing what you are doing. 

    Grand Realty

    Until signing up with Carrot, Grand Realty didn’t have a website. Their business did pretty well simply from word of mouth – they closed 45 transactions the first year. After getting the sites set-up, they didn’t do much with them for the first 4-5 months. 

    The first thing we talked about was knowing where the leads were coming from. In the “Campaigns” section, you can enter your information and find out! For this situation, we wanted to know how many people were coming to the site via the Eugene House Buyers site. This will let Robert know if people are actually clicking the link he has up. 

    If you are working with buyers and sellers as a real estate agent, why not set up landing pages for both? So many of our agents only create city-specific landing pages for homebuyers, without anything targeting home sellers. Since Robert focuses more on listings, I advised him to get some pages up there to attract home sellers in his market area. The more you niche these pages into seller specific situations, the easier it will be to get them to rank. 

    A question Robert had about his site was if he should market as Eugene or Eugene and Springfield, and which way would be better for SEO. If you search Google for real estate in Eugene and you see results or related searches for Springfield, you’ll know that Google looks at them as one and the same.

    Since we did find Springfield results, and since his pages are ranking well, leaving them as Eugene and Springfield is the way to go. I do recommend that Robert create separate landing pages for each city. Adding in some great backlinks can help to bump up these pages even higher. 

    If you are creating lots of pages for your site, you don’t need to have them all in the primary menu. For example, Zillow will rank #1 for everything and they have millions of pages, but you don’t see links to all of them on their homepage. It’s once you search within Zillow, and you see all of the subpages and related searches that those other pages come into play. You can set up your site in the same way. 

    Immediate Action Steps

    By doing just a few small things, Robert will be able to maximize the value of the sites he has with us. Here is what we have advised him to do… 

    • Amp up the about pages
    • Implement Facebook retargeting
    • Utilizing our Campaigns feature to know where leads are coming from
    • Update stock content
    • Create better follow up and offer multiple solutions to clients
    • Create landing pages for sellers on the reality side
    • Add credibility to testimonials using photos or even video

    By taking these few simple steps, Robert and his team will be able to reach more people, build credibility, and begin to establish themselves as the authority when it comes to real estate and in the Eugene area. 

    Making An Impact

    A couple of years ago Robert shifted the way he did business. He, along with Ryan Fletcher created the Impact Club in the Eugene area as a way to give back. One of the initial projects gave $10k to The Clarity Water Project and to date they have been able to donate over $94k back into the local community. For Robert, it is all about building those finances so he can have the greatest impact on his community as possible. 

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  • Carrot Success Story: How To Drive 7 Figures Through Your Carrot Site With Ryan Dossey

    Carrot Success Story: How To Drive 7 Figures Through Your Carrot Site With Ryan Dossey

    “If you had to give a ballpark guess, how much money would you say your Carrot site is worth to your business?” I asked.

    I reached out to Ryan Dossey for an interview because first, he’s been a Carrot member since like 2014 (long enough that he can’t remember exactly when he signed up) and more importantly, because he’s a wildly successful entrepreneur and real estate investor.

    He has been mentioned and/or quoted in Forbes, Time, Money, Entrepreneur, and Yahoo Finance.

    In the last 18 months, his business, Christopher Ellyn Homes (which does a little of everything — wholesaling, flipping, and buy-and-hold) acquired $8.8 million in rentals.

    In terms of cash flow, his real estate investing business typically generates somewhere in the high five-figure range every month (they’ve hit 7 figures a few times).

    He’s also the founder of Call Porter and Ballpoint Marketing.

    “Oh man. It’s hard to place a number on that. But I’d say that our Carrot site is easily worth 7 figures to our business,”

    Ryan responded…

    “I mean, we’ve done 7 figures in assignments through that site. If it wasn’t for my Carrot site, I wouldn’t have the same credibility I have today in my market.”

    Talk about some awesome feedback!

    He also offered some tips for real estate investors who are looking to grow their businesses and cut through the clutter.

    5 Ways Ryan Dossey Generates Consistent 7 Figures

    #1: You Gotta Get a Carrot Site

    Back in 2012, Ryan was just getting into real estate investing. And the first site he created for his business was hosted on Lead Propeller — one of our competitors that many of you are probably aware of.

    But eventually, Ryan got fed-up with painfully low conversion rates and moved to Carrot.

    More specifically, his Lead Propeller site was suffering to the tune of a 1% or 2% conversion rate. His Carrot site now receives about an 11% conversion rate.

    He gets far more leads. And because of that, he’s able to build a sustainable business with predictable lead-flow and income.

    Even when sending direct mail, Ryan says,

    “It’s my website that build credibility when people are trying to learn about my business. If I didn’t have a trustworthy site that loads fast and looks like a million bucks and converts well, then my business wouldn’t be as profitable as it is today — plain and simple.”

    Which begs the question: is your site doing all of those things? If it isn’t, then you might consider getting yourself a Carrot site. Our sites load even faster than Google and we’re constantly optimizing tech stack, SEO, and design. To quote Ryan once more,

    “My favorite thing about Carrot is that they’re constantly optimizing so you don’t have to.”

    #2: Customize Your Carrot Site

    Christopher Ellyn Homes - Carrot Site

    Having been a Carrot member for 4 or 5 years, I thought Ryan would be the perfect guy to give advice to new Carrot members about how to get the most of their membership.

    So I asked him,

    “What would you tell new Carrot members to do with their site to get the most bang for their buck?”

    His response was simple:

    “Customize it. You have to make it your own. You have to create a brand image for your business.”

    Specifically referring to his own Carrot site, he said,

    “We customized the hero image on the homepage, we rewrote and customized the entire ‘Our Company’ page, and we replaced all of the stock images with real images of our city or the people who work in our business.”

    And he recommends that all Carrot members do the same thing.

    “Carrot provides a great foundation, but you have to customize your site if you really want to stand out from the competition.”

    Ryan and his team even went so far as to create separate landing pages for different markets where they operate (something we highly recommend doing — you can learn more about optimizing your city pages).

    Originally, Ryan did all of these customizations himself to save on money. But recently, he decided to sign up for Carrot’s Concierge service, where we make all of these site changes for you, specific to your industry and business.

    Of our Concierge service, Ryan commented,

    “We noticed some pretty solid changes. Actually, our bounce rate went down and our sessions duration went up after going through Carrot’s Concierge service.”

    I asked him for specifics and he said that his bounce rate went from 70% before the Concierge service to 65% and his average session duration went from 2:18 to 3:18.

    Pretty cool, huh?

    Related Content: Here are 13 Changes You Can Make to Differentiate Your Carrot site in Under 10 Minutes

    #3: Publish Regular Blog SEO Content

    Value of real estate investor blog posts

    At Carrot, we talk a lot about the power of maintaining a blog on your real estate site. It helps make your site appear more active to visitors and it gives your website more opportunities to rank in Google (which means more chances to generate free traffic and leads).

    And we’re so adamant about the importance of having a blog on your site that our Content Pro and Advanced Marketer plans include monthly content.

    That’s right — every month we’ll send you content for your blog so you don’t have to spend hours writing and researching your own content. The Content Pro plan includes 12 articles every month and the Advanced Marketer plan includes the same 12 plus 12 more exclusive articles.

    From our experience, more content equals more leads.

    And when I asked Ryan what his favorite thing about Carrot is, he said,

    “I love the blog content that Carrot provides.”

    When I asked him why he loves it, he said,

    “Well, first, because it fills out our site and makes us appear more active. But also because those articles are actually generating leads for our business every month.”

    And while we recommend customizing about 25% of the articles that we give our members to avoid duplicate content, Ryan and his team just post those articles on their website without any changes.

    And still, those articles are generating about 10% of all of their website’s traffic every single month purely through SEO.

    real estate website traffic every month through SEO
    We highlighted the URLs which are blog articles on Ryan’s site.

    Sure — you could publish your own blog content. But you have enough other work to do — you don’t need to add consistent content marketing to your plate.

    Why not let us write the blog articles for you?

    Plus, if you really want to create some of your own content on top of what we provide you with, then we’ve made it dead-simple and lightning-fast through a little tool we call VideoPost.

    Related Content: On-Page SEO for Real Estate: 16 Steps to Optimize Your Websites

    #4: Target Competitor’s Keywords

    bidding on competitor keywords

    One day, Ryan was doing some SEO research for his real estate website. He typed “Christopher Ellyn Homes” — the name of his company — into Google to make sure that they were ranking first for branded search terms…

    …but wait — what’s this?

    Looking at the Google Ads, he noticed that some of his competitors were spending money to target his branded keyword phrases.

    After doing some research on the ad strategy, he decided to do something similar. Now he targets some of his biggest market competitor’s branded keywords with his own Google ads.

    What’s more? He’s even generating a few leads every month with this strategy! And the even cooler part he mentioned is that the cost-per-lead with this strategy is dirt cheap — specifically, $15.

    So why not give it a try yourself? It’s worth a shot, especially if your competitors are already trying to steal your own leads. ;-)

    Related Content: Learn How To Find High-Intent Real Estate Keywords and Dominate Your Market’s SEO Rankings

    #5: He Doesn’t Use Yellow Letters & Postcards – Instead, Goes Color

    real estate direct mail yellow letter
    (Image Source)

    Yellow letters are extremely common among real estate investors.

    And the reason is simple: they get opened. After all, if you received a yellow letter in your mailbox, you’re going to open it simply to see if it’s as important as it claims to be.

    There are a few problems with sending yellow letters, though. First, it’s very competitive — so if you do it, too, you’re just joining in with that clutter. As Earl Nightingale once said…

    “Look at what the majority of people are doing, and do the exact opposite, and you’ll probably never go wrong for as long as you live.”

    Second, a yellow letter can be portrayed as dishonest. The implication of a yellow letter is that it’s some sort of legal warning. But, of course, that isn’t true. So when someone opens up your letter, there’s a serious chance of frustration because they feel deceived.

    Ryan Dossey makes a strong case against yellow letters and postcards, saying, “They are just the same old thing. If you want to get a higher response rate, you have to do something different. You have to stand out.”

    Instead, Ryan uses full-color, custom branded pieces. And he says that he gets a higher response rate from his direct mail than anyone else in his market. “It’s a huge advantage,” he says.

    So consider ditching the yellow letters and postcards and trying something else — something that none of your competitors are doing.

    Conclusion

    At Carrot, we take our member’s success very seriously. If our members succeed at building businesses that provide them with financial and personal freedom, then we count that as a win.

    In fact, our mission at Carrot is to “Add humanity back to business and give people more time in life for the things that matter.”

    If you feel like you’re on the hamster wheel with your business, constantly grinding away but never see real promising results, never building tangible momentum that can carry your business forward for years to come, then we might be the solution you’re looking for.

    We’ve generated millions of leads for thousands of real estate professionals around the country, and we’d love to do the same for you. Give us a risk-free try over here and let’s build the business of your dreams together. :-)

  • EP 183: How I Grossed $1.6 Million Flipping Land Using Leads Other Investors Are Ignoring w/ Willie Goldberg

    EP 183: How I Grossed $1.6 Million Flipping Land Using Leads Other Investors Are Ignoring w/ Willie Goldberg

    $1.6 Million Gross Profit Wholesaling Land Deals Other Investors are Ignoring

    What’s up, everyone! If you’ve listened to the CarrotCast in the past, you’ll know that we’ve done a few episodes on flipping land and how beneficial it can be. I don’t think most investors recognize the value of vacant land.

    You won’t have to physically visit the site, there aren’t any plumbing, roofing, or heating systems to maintain, and best of all, the competition is usually much lower. 

    Willie Goldberg has been a real estate investor for only 2.5 years. While most people are throwing away land deals, he’s made $1.6 million gross in the last 12 months!

    Using his Carrot sites, he’s been able to generate 60 deals in the past few months alone! 

    Today I’m super excited to sit down with Willie to discuss how he first got into land, what he’s doing to capture his leads and to learn his strategy of how he plans to close 500 land deals over the next 12 months!

    Read the Full Show Notes Below…


    How I Grossed $1.6 Million Flipping Land Using Leads Other Investors Are Ignoring w/ Willie Goldberg

    What do you do when you get a land lead? While many people throw these leads away, for Willie Goldberg, it is how he has built his business. After learning about many types of real estate investment, Willie settled on land when he realized there was incredibly low overhead and he could buy and sell from anywhere. 

    Will Goldberg first started his business in April of 2017. Since college, he had worked in finance, but he knew it wasn’t the lifestyle he was after. Becoming an entrepreneur through real estate became his goal, and in May of 2018, he was able to quit his job to pursue it full-time. 

    Today, Willie lives in Chicago, but his primary market is in Southern California. He is also buying and selling land in other places such as New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, and a few other states. His current team consists of a partner, a salesperson in the Chicago office, a Transaction Coordinator, and a VA in the Philippines. 

    Finding Land Sellers

    Even with an excellent Carrot Website for your land business, you’ll need to have a way to direct them there. For many land investors, direct mail is how leads are initially activated. That initial piece of contact will direct them to your site.

    For Willie, his direct mail piece is a simple and to the point offer letter. He mails to micro-geographic areas with blanket offers for vacant lots. 

    Determining Offer Prices

    The first recommendation Willie has when it comes to creating his offers is to not overthink it. His strategy is to use Datatree while pulling comps from Zillow, Realtor.com, and Landwatch. He will determine an offer price that is fair and will still get him a deal, and out the mailers go.

    Of course, if someone calls in and their land is actually valued much higher or much lower, Willie and his team will present a counteroffer that makes more sense.  

    Finding Land Buyers

    For Willie, as with many other real estate investors, Facebook Marketplace has proven to be an excellent place to capture leads. He has a VA who manages Facebook, answering all of the inquiries from ads they post. Their emails are collected to create a huge potential buyers list. 

    Willie also offers to his buyers is owner financing. This has been monumental in his success. By offering owner financing, he is able to get the lots sold faster, all while creating a guaranteed monthly income for himself, something many real estate wholesalers often lack.

    Another great way to bring buyers in the door is through videoposts. I am always a big proponent of video to build credibility and connection with potential clients. Your videos don’t have to be complex. A quick cell phone video of you in front of your computer can be very powerful. 

    You can take your videos one step further by using our awesome video post feature, which will allow you to shoot and post a transcribed video in less than 10 minutes! 

    Building Credibility As A Land Seller

    Right on his website, Willie allows buyers to use a credit card to purchase a property through owner financing. But in order to covert, he has to make sure people realize that his company is real and that they will actually receive the land they are paying for. To do this, it is important to build trust and credibility as a land seller. 

    Willie has done this through video, email campaigns, and with the information provided on his about page. He has done a very good job of this too. Willie landed on our radar after we saw his site was generating 3,000-4,000 leads!

    His customized Carrot site was generating high-quality leads that he is now helping others do the same with his Land Flipping Course. He now has over 75 coaching students, with more and more learning his methods by the day! 

    If you are a current Carrot customer who is interested in land, head over to Carrot to check out our land sites. You can get one up and running without much customization or effort! Stop throwing away your land leads, follow in Willie’s footsteps to start generating revenue from an often overlooked niche! 

    Follow Our Guest:

    Check out Willie’s websites:

    Mentioned In This Episode:

    Both CarrotCast episodes featuring Jack Bosch –

    #1: You Can Achieve Financial Freedom and Build True Wealth

    #2: He’s Flipped 4,000 Pieces of Land… Why It’s An Amazing Time To Start

    We want to hear your thoughts on the podcast! Drop them in the comments section below or hit us up on Facebook or Instagram

  • Carrot Success Story: How Carter Steph Grew His Investing Business To $2 Million In Revenue

    Carrot Success Story: How Carter Steph Grew His Investing Business To $2 Million In Revenue

    How Carter Steph’s closing rate skyrocketed from 7% to 20% within a few months after switching from a custom website to Carrot.

    Carter Steph is a licensed broker for 20 years and in 2016, he purchased the real estate investing business that he now runs, which operates in Oklahoma City.

    Snapshot:

    • Industry: Investor and Agent
    • Location: Oklahoma City
    • Clients Served: 1000+
    • Year founded: Co-owner since 2016

    What I didn’t expect after switching to Carrot, is my lead to close ratio increased 50% on my offline leads!

    – Carter Steph

    Carter Steph is a real estate investor since 1992 and is also a licensed real estate broker in Oklahoma City.

    He’s also a practicing attorney for almost 20 years and has been the General Counsel at 1-800-2SellHomes since 2014 and co-owner since 2016. He’s no newbie to real estate. He and his team consistently generate seven figures per year in net profits, while closing on about 20% of their leads.

    The growth is steady and predictable.

    “You ask anybody in town and they know us,” he said in a CarrotCast interview.

    Read the tips below, taken straight from Carter Steph’s 7-figure growth strategy.

    The tools: Carrot features

    For Carter, Carrot is the central hub that brings all of his marketing efforts together. He’s running PPC ads to drive traffic to his site while leveraging Carrot’s easy content marketing tools and strategy to build his SEO for long-term lead generation.

    Since he’s driving traffic from all of his marketing efforts to his Carrot site, he can track performance across all campaigns and channels, giving him the clarity needed with his marketing strategy.

    Here’s how Carter is using Carrot as the central hub to tie together the marketing efforts they were once doing on their own to become the authority in their area:


    Switching from a custom website to a Get a high-converting website
    Before Carter Steph went on his journey to $2 million in revenue in 2018, he was doing some things with his website very differently than he is now.

    In fact, with the powers of technology, I was able to dig up his several-year-old website for all of us to look at.

    Believe it or not, that custom website cost Carter and his business $5,000 upfront and $700 per month for hosting fees.

    That’s quite expensive.

    And it’s even more expensive when you find out that it had a terrible conversion rate and almost never generated any leads for Carter’s business — the leads it did generate weren’t very good quality and Carter’s close rate was only 7%.

    For that reason, they were spending $1,500 on PPC every month but $30,000 to $40,000 on TV ads.

    Then they switched to Carrot.

    The difference was immediate, Carter said. After just 2 days, their new Carrot site had generated its first high-quality lead. And within a few months, their close rate skyrocketed from the previous 7% to 20% because lead-quality increased.

    Carrot Real Estate Investing Business Website

    After Trevor and Carter ran some estimations on the CarrotCast interview, they determined that Carter is saving between $20,000 and $50,000 every single month in lost lead-gen closing potential after switching from their expensive custom-made site to one of our Carrot sites.

    Wow!

    Now they close 20% of leads, their PPC budget is $8,000 per month (because their website is converting as it should be), and they’re growing like crazy. Sometimes, the small changes make a big difference. And at Carrot, small, iterative, conversion-optimization changes is exactly what we’re focused on. ;-)


    Evergreen Marketing
    In marketing terms, Evergreen is marketing you do once, and it works for years… not hours, days or weeks. Content relevant for a long time, that serves your best prospects, and gets in front of them where they’re searching online.

    Carter has organic leads grow over time using this exact marketing strategy.


    Automated blogs
    Content marketing is huge for businesses trying to establish themselves as an authority in their market. In order to do this, you have to create a lot of content, and Carrot makes it easy by providing pre-written automated blog posts that require very little time on your part!


    SEO Keyword Tracking
    By using our keyword tracking tool, Carter can readily track the search engine rankings of his web pages. We make it easy for you to quickly gain insight into which keywords are rising and falling in Google’s results pages so that you know where your web page stands relative to other sites on similar topics.

    The results:

    Quick Highlights

    2000+

    Leads

    20%

    Closing Rate

    8

    Top 3 Keyword Ranking

    Carter added $20k/mo in new profits by shifting from a fancy custom website into an
    “Authority Hub”

    “We couldn’t be happier with the site so far…What we have seen is a DRAMATIC increase in web leads.  Since switching to Carrot, the leads we are getting are converting to purchases at a MUCH higher level.  

    Things have been moving so fast that we haven’t had the opportunity to accurately determine the lead to purchase ratio, but I would estimate it is in the 25 to 35% range, which means the leads we are getting are significantly better than our historical average.

    Thanks for everything and we are now looking at expansion because of the success we have had in such a short time.”

    – Carter Steph