My name is Mike and I work for the best company in the world…
Literally.
We’re all over the place. I’m sitting at a coffee shop in Klamath Falls, Oregon right now.
Yes. I had the barista take this photo for me.
A few weeks ago, I was cruising through Yellowstone, Montana-side with my wife and one-year old goober as we travelled through four different states in a week to visit family and enjoy new scenery. Here’s us in Parks City, Utah.
And during the entire month of May, I sat on the beach in Cairns, Australia sipping on a flat white from a local café.
The best part?
I didn’t take a single day of paid-time-off during any of those travels. By coordinating time-zone changes, traveling on weekends, and using my friendly international hotspot that works in 120 different countries, I kept working closely with all my amazing Carrot team members.
And I’m not the only one who takes advantage of our culture where we can travel and work while we’re gone…
Alex, our tall-and-handsome marketing manager, jet-skiing on the Columbia River with his wife.Alex hiking through Glacier National Park with a curious ice-cream cone expression.And again, but the ice-cream was gone by this point. If you look really close, you can see Alex taking the selfie in the reflection of his glasses.And here’s Dan, a Customer Success Hero, working on his Q2 review this year on a beach in Nice, France.Dan again, but this time in Paris.Andre, another Customer Success Hero, trying to stay warm while on a team call in the 50 degree weather of Northern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains
“Flexibility of location and hours is the #1 reason I came to work for the company and I have stayed because of the growth culture. Aaron and I try to have one work-ation a year where we adjust hours for one jam-packed adventure. We have been to New York, Connecticut, Northern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains, Costa Rica, and miscellaneous beaches of Oregon… Few people get the opportunity to experience that and we were able to experience much of the land and culture along the way.”
– Andre, Customer Success Hero
Chris, our General Nerdery champion, visiting train tracks in Rockway Beach, OregonDanni, our Client Services Coordinator, working in Costa Rica under the sunset’s glimmer.Josh, our Design Integrator Extraordinaire, taking the middle of the day off to hike Benham Falls during his visit to Sunriver, Oregon.Levi, one of our Sales Guys, and his wife in Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.Levi again, but this time kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland from 15 stories in the air with a 150-pound guy who is supposed to “catch” him if he falls. According to legend, those who kiss the Blarney Stone receive the gift of smooth talking. Rumor has it that Levi married his wife shortly after kissing the Blarney Stone. But that rumor is unconfirmed because I just made it up.Grady, a Customer Success Hero, and his wife fishing and hiking during their travels to Wyoming.Shaun, our Deign Integrator Extraordinaire, on a trip to Disneyland with his family where he worked mornings and evenings.Brendan, our Advertising and SEO Coordinator, enjoying Disneyland with his family.
“Luckily this with the opportunity to work will abroad, I’ve been able to not miss anything that the kids are involved in or things we want to do. Disney, SF, Portland, Eugene, Salem, Sacramento, Corvallis, Coos Bay, Crescent City, Vegas… I’ve been able to cross a couple of bucket list items off and have helped (and will help) Krissy cross a couple more off.”
– Brendan, Advertising and SEO Coordinator
Jen, our official Minister for Magic of Random Tasks, and a Carrot Bud enjoying a boat ride through the San Francisco Bay.
Jen also visited Disneyland with her family recently.
“Disney trip was a Christmas gift for my kids that I was able to make happen because of a bonus from Carrot and a flexible work schedule.”
– Jen Delamotte, Minister for Magic of Random Tasks
Carrot Bud trying to pull the sword from the stone in Disneyland – shocked workers had to replace the sword with a prop shortly after.Carrot Bud trying Guinness for the first time.Jake, Carrot’s Tech Support Genius, at a concert with some seriously gangsta glasses.And of course, our CEO, Trevor Mauch, enjoying the lake with his family.Again, Trevor, but this time riding a carousel and holding on to his son for support.
Yeah. We’ve been all over the place.
It’s exactly that freedom that makes Carrot such a great place to work – a place where each of us is dedicated to making your business dreams come true. Because when your dreams come true, our dreams come true.
Where has Carrot allowed you to travel? If we’ve helped you build a business that gives you a similar type of freedom, then leave us a comment and let us know.
In fact, we’ll send a swag bag to the first 10 people to leave a comment and tell us about a vacation that they were able to take because of the business that Carrot helped them build.
Either way, cheers to your business, your financial and personal freedom, and the business that we know you’re capable of building – even if you’re not there yet.
You’ll get there. And we’ll help
Yes. Those are one liter each (it was Brendan’s idea).
If you’re not getting many motivated seller leads to your real estate investing website, it’s for one of two reasons. Here, we’ll help you diagnose your “no leads” issue…
This post is going to help YOU break down the patterns that lead to success in real estate investment — with a special focus on online lead generation.
We’ve focused on what investors are doing right, so it only seemed fair to focus on what’s going wrong.
A few times a week the same thing happens, we get emails from non-Carrot members that look something like this:
“Help! I’m not getting many motivated house seller leads from my website and I don’t know why!”
It always stinks to hear that, but the good news is that most real estate investing websites struggle to generate leads for a few basic reasons.
So let’s dive in to get to the crux of the problem.
Getting leads online really equates to only two simple things. Traffic and Conversion. But before you get started, take a few minutes and watch…
It All Comes Down To Traffic and Conversion
Traffic – Are you getting traffic to your website? (ranking well for keywords that actually get enough searches to matter?)
Conversion – Does your website convert enough of those visitors to leads?
So, when someone emails in and asks for advice to get leads… it always comes down to those two things.
Traffic and conversion.
This post is mainly about the Traffic part since we already know the Carrot system converts (Conversion Examples:Here , Here , and Here ).
So first we look at the traffic… because if there isn’t any traffic going to your website… conversion doesn’t matter.
If your website is converting motivated seller leads at 15% (15 of every 100 visitors sends you their info, which is solid)… and you’re only getting 25 people to your website each month… that’s only about 4 leads per month.
Not much to build a business off of right?
So… here’s what we do.
We start problem-solving by asking the same questions. If you’re banking on SEO is a part of your traffic generation strategy… we’ll ask you this question first:
How much search volume is happening in your market?
In simple terms… are there enough people in the areas you’re targeting searching for the keywords in Google that your pages are ranking for?
Unfortunately, most of the time we get a “huh?” in response.
Then we explain:
Even if you’re ranking at the top of a search, no one is going to click your link if no one is searching.
Then a lot of times we’ll dive in and do a little bit of research, only to discover what we already know… that there’s little to no search volume in their market for the keywords they’re ranking for.
It’s like putting a great billboard on a dark back alley street that no one sees.
But put that same awesome billboard on a busy street… then it produces GREAT results.
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Here are Some Examples For You
For a quick illustration of what I’m talking about, let’s look at some US cities and check out the search volume (using the keyword planner tool in Google’s Adwords) for a common search term in each market, “we buy houses [insert your city]”.
This term tends to be a popular search phrase across most cities in the US so it’s usually a great barometer in any market for the volume of “highly motivated sellers” in that market:
The Good – Below are numbers for average monthly searches for those terms in Google. You can note that some cities get MANY more searches than others… showing the potential SEO demand for that keyword.
Our barometer is anything over 30 per month is worth making a page for on your website with our SEO Grader tool to help you rank for that term.
The Bad – Below are numbers in a few cities we grabbed out of thin air. One of the cities below is a city that a client of ours is ranked well for but emailed us saying he hadn’t been getting leads to his website.
Why? “we buy houses fair oaks” isn’t getting much search action. The Fair Oaks market may not be a great city to focus on for all of your online lead generation efforts.
Now, it’s important to realize a couple of things about that data:
Each of those is the average number of monthly searches over the last 12 months. It’s really common to see big spikes in search volume one month, followed by a major drop in traffic in the next if an economic event happened in that city causing more motivated sellers (a huge job layoff in the city, etc.).
Notice that the most populated city has the least amount of searches: In this example, Philly was searched 24x more often than NYC, although it has only 18% of the population.
Searches like these are often motivated by external factors
We originally wrote this post in 2014 when we did a Google search for “Philadelphia layoffs,” and at that time there were almost 4,000 teachers were laid off in June of 2013. The point is, when lots of people lose their jobs at once, it’s easy to imagine panicked sales taking place if folks can’t pay their bills.
These searches for the “we buy houses [insert your city]” and “sell my house fast [insert your city]” terms happen when people need fast answers (and you want to be in front of them when they search for those fast answers, like our client David Brown has been able to do).
They’ll often do a quick search, and if they find what they’re looking for, they’ll put in their information into a form and become a “lead”. If they don’t see what they want, they’ll keep moving until they find it.
But if SEO is your main marketing strategy, you won’t get any leads if there aren’t many searches for the specific phrases you’re ranking for.
Search Engine Optimization for Real Estate Investors Only Works When Enough People Are Searching The Phrases You’re Ranking For
Too many SEO services out there just focus on getting you rankings… because rankings are sexy right?
But those rankings don’t matter much if they’re for terms that only a handful of people are searching each month.
So what happens if you’re in one of those markets that aren’t getting many searches for the popular terms like “we buy houses [your city]” or “sell house fast [your city]”?
Does This Mean That You Should Abandon SEO When Searches Are Low?
Not at all!
In fact, it’s a really good time to build your business and get creative.
Remember, SEO is a long-term strategy. It’s not a short-term one.
And if you’re really wanting to generate consistent leads and dominate your local market online… you can still do that!
I just closed a deal from you guys, it was all because of your site and the credibility built in and all that. Going to be a really profitable deal, and I’m going to reinvest that going forward. You guys rock and I love the sites and everything you all do! – Joseph Sauter, Quick Cash Sale For You
While yes, there are some markets where there just aren’t a lot of motivated sellers searching online… but it doesn’t mean the sellers aren’t out there searching.
You just need to broaden out your keywords that you focus on your website so rather than banking all of your traffic on just the “we buy houses ” or “sell house fast ” keywords… add in others.
Not Getting SEO Leads? Here’s Your Plan Of Action…
Create some pages on your motivated seller website for “Focus Keywords” (use our SEO Grader tool to help you optimize these pages for those phrases very easily) like…
sell your house fast [insert city]
how to sell house fast in [insert city]
how can I sell my house fast [insert city]
sell my house for cash [insert city]
how to rent your house in [insert city] (many people who need to sell, just quit and settle for renting. Write an article on your blog!)
tips on selling your [insert city] house
… you get the idea.
If rather than trying to bank your lead generation on 1 term that only gets 30 searches a month… why not create some more pages on your website (InvestorCarrot makes that crazy easy) that are focused on other keywords ALSO in your market… so you have 15 pages ranking for search phrases that get 30 searches a month each.
Make sense?
If NOT, hit us with questions below and we’ll dive in and clarify for you… we’ll even get specific and help you figure it out for your own market through the comments section below.
Even if you’re in an area that doesn’t currently get a lot of search data… it’s worth it to rank well there.
When something happens in your market (like layoffs) that create a lot of demand for fast, cash buyers, you want to be first in line to capture those leads. Working on SEO now is critical to rank high when searches do pick up.
If you’re like most investors you’re deeply focused on your local market and what’s happening today. You’re only working to make deals happen soon, not years or months down the road.
That might be a mistake.
Too many investors are only thinking about short-term results… even though the best investment advice is always focused on long-term wealth-building, not scattered attempts to get rich fast.
If you’ve got the bigger picture in mind, there are a few ways you can grow your business:
Get inventory in other ways. Go old-school and start knocking on doors. Network. Partner up with companies who provide services to homeowners under financial distress. Put up signs. Advertise – good pay-per-click can be really helpful to capture the few searches that do exist. Since the leads are fewer, you’ll have to pay more to get them. That’s supply and demand.
Focus on growing a different list. If you’ve been trying to capture seller leads, shift your focus to building a list of cash buyers. Ditto on rent-to-own tenants. When inventory is tight there are lots of people looking for deals, so set up another site to grab those leads. If you hustle, you can find ways to profit from those lists, even when inventory is low.
Branch out to surrounding markets too. Too often people get stuck thinking that they need to work where they are, instead of going to find the place where they can add the most value. Start with other cities around you and see if there is more search volume in those cities. I know investors who have switched their focus away from the major metro areas and are focusing on smaller, blue-collar areas where there’s less competition from other investors. Once you’re really good at building lists, generating leads and doing deals, you don’t have to be geographically limited at all. With the right local partners, you can work anywhere.
Adjust your strategy. Too many investors and entrepreneurs get stuck on a particular path, and they lose their perspective on the big picture. They forget that they are subject to the whims of the market and that the market is entirely outside of their control. When there’s not a high rate of foreclosures, wholesaling and flipping get tougher. More competition + fewer deals = Lower profit margins.
Does that mean that wholesaling and flipping are bad strategies?
No, not at all – just that you’ve gotta pay attention to the conditions in your local market without forgetting the bigger picture.
Know Your Market And The Trends (Or we’ll help keep you up to date :-)
To illustrate, let’s do a quick Google Trends search in the US for “we buy houses” just to see how the graph moves around:
As you can see, there were a lot more folks searching for “we buy houses” back in the fall.
Overall in the US economy, we seem to be exiting a period of high fluctuation and returning to a slow, stable growth pattern.
And while trends in our market change… so do the things that sellers and cash buyers type into Google.
Just do your research (or follow us here on this blog and we’ll do it for you) and adapt on your website to focus on the keywords your market is typing into Google.
For now…
“we buy houses” and “sell house fast” (and related terms) are still some of the most popular for the ultra-motivated sellers
“investment properties in ” is a search term growing in popularity right now big time (GROW THAT BUYERS LIST!)
If your market doesn’t have many searches for those terms… consider going after other keyword terms like the ones I mentioned in this article… OR, branch out into other surrounding cities to capture search rankings in those ones too so you can do deals there too to increase your lead flow.
Sound like a plan?
Hit us with your questions about your market below… or questions about how to take this knowledge and use it on your own websites to get more traffic and leads this year.
Don’t Have Time To Focus On SEO But See The Value?
Think about this. If you’re investing in markets that get at least 30 searches a month for “we buy houses [insert your city]”… and don’t have the time or energy to focus on worrying about the SEO yourself… we can help.
If you’re interested in a long-term SEO strategy for your business, you should check out our SEO services… we’ll let you know if your local market has the search volume to make SEO worth the investment based on what we uncover.
Don’t have a website or want a system that works great to generate traffic and convert the leads?
Not when it comes to optimizing your websites for conversion. ;-)
Constantly, we’re on the look-out for new ways to improve your (our member’s) website conversion rate. But we don’t just want to increase your conversion rate, we want to make it dead simple for you to make those conversion rate improvements.
In other words, we want to help you convert more visitors in less time.
The Carrot Credibility Bar
Here’s a look at what this credibility bar might end up looking like on your website. This is a version with a testimonial.
And here’s a version with logos.
If that ain’t enough for you, then we even have a custom version where you can add your own text and images to your heart’s desire – like we did with this block quote…
Or video…
Pretty awesome, right?
But this new feature isn’t just remarkable because the dev team here at Carrot did an amazing job designing it and making it easy for our members to use.
No. The feature is amazing for another, more important, reason.
It’s going to help you build more credibility on your website, instantly. But you don’t have to take my word for it.
ConversionXL ran an in-depth test to determine which type of social proof on a credibility bar is the most effective. They used testimonials with and without photos, logos, social sharing buttons, and a whole slew of other types of social proof.
Here’s one example.
Then, they had a control version that ran without any credibility bar.
In the end, one thing was for sure: every single variation of the page with some type of social proof performed better than the control.
And the reason is simple: when people arrive on your website for the first time, they have no reason to trust you. You have to show them that you’re trustworthy. Of course, you want to do that as quickly as possible to avoid them bouncing from your website.
This is why a front-and-center, top-of-the-page, no-scrolling-required credibility bar is so damn effective at building that necessary trust.
People see it the moment they arrive on your website and it confirms for the visitor that they can, indeed, trust you.
Just consider massive organizations like Opendoor, insurance.com, or ourselves ( :D ) that count on a credibility bar for building trust with visitors.
So, you’re probably wondering by now, What should I put on MY website’s credibility bar?
For that, there are a few different options.
Consider…
Displaying a compelling testimonial from a happy customer.
Displaying a series of logos from publications your business has been mentioned in.
Displaying a series of logos from other companies you’ve worked with.
Displaying awards your business has won.
The way you to choose to use this feature will depend on how you want to build credibility with website visitors and the kind of credibility builders you have access to.
But, to help you make an informed decision, here are the types of social proof that ConversionXL found (from the study I mentioned earlier) had the highest recall rate among participants, and thus (this part is conjecture) the highest impact.
As it turns out, testimonials were the most effective at generating website visitor recall.
Whatever type of social proof you choose, every single Carrot member should be able to make use of this feature – whether it’s through a testimonial or a series of company logos. This feature worked with our real estate agent websites as well!
Plus, a credibility bar can help you stand out from other websites online (i.e. the competition), giving you the extra edge you need in your market.
If you still don’t want to use the credibility bar, though, no worries. This feature is completely optional, so you can just leave your website as it is now if you’d rather.
We get this question from our members quite a lot: “My website is converting phenomenally, but how can I make it look different from other Carrot websites?”
Sure. We have several different high-converting website templates. Still, though, many of you want to be able to differentiate your website even further from other Carrot members.
So, in an effort to give you more customization freedom on your Carrot website without sacrificing ease of use and the highest conversion rates in the industry, we’ve officially launched our new Hero customizer…
Your New Hero Customizer
Let’s take a quick look at the new feature. You now have three options when customizing your website’s hero section…
Columns (the traditional Carrot style)…
Stacked…
And Inline…
Not bad, huh?
So why did we decide to give you these optional customizations on your website? Why not just give you a single option that converts better than the rest? Three reasons.
Choosing one of these options will help you differentiate your website from other Carrot members – something many of our clients have asked for.
These changes allow us, here at Carrot, to continue testing your websites and iterating based on what we find. With different people using different fields, we can continue to test and increase your website’s conversion rate through iteration.
We also want you to be able to test different form fields on your website. We’ve run lots of tests on these forms (more on that in a minute) and one overarching thing has revealed itself: different forms perform better in different markets.
Depending on the demographics, sophistication, population, and other market factors, one of these three forms will likely win the day. To help further, though, let’s chat about some of the data we collected before launching this feature.
Our Hero Customizer Experiment
Our test analyzed seven different Carrot websites. On each control version, the hero form was either stacked…
Or columned…
The variation for each website, on the other hand, was an inline form…
As you might have already guessed, we wanted to see what kind of impact an inline, single-field form would have on conversions. The results?
Ultimately, what we found was inconclusive. Some of the websites experienced as much as a 49% lift in conversion rate. Others saw a slight lift, between 10% and 20%. And one of the websites actually experienced a 25% decrease in conversions.
Regardless of which form you choose, you’re in good hands. Here at Carrot, we don’t publish a form-type unless it’ll drive a conversion rate that’s higher than the industry standard.
Ideally, you’ll do some testing of your own. Like I mentioned earlier, different forms work better in different markets. Play around, A/B test each different hero field, and see which one has the highest conversion rate for your market.
Maybe the best part about this new feature, though, is how easy the dev team has made it to adjust your hero field. I swear, we have the best nerds in the industry.
Literally, just a few clicks to make the change…
And if you want more details on how to adjust your hero field with just a few clicks, you can go here.
Happy customizing! And let us know what you think of this new feature in the comments!
Listen to the CarrotCast Podcast and Subscribe Below!
In order to extract yourself from your business, you’ve got to take the time to hire the right people. Brad Chandler
CarrotCamp Spring 2018 was again unlike most events. It was an opportunity for campers to immerse themselves with the knowledge of some of the nations’ largest home buyers. It wasn’t a workshop or seminar, nor was it a retreat.
This was a time to strategize as well as brainstorm with some high, high-level investors.
We also took the time to unwind while hiking to area waterfalls as well as a mountain biking excursion.
Camper then got the opportunity to work one-on-one with our team to get massive things done to uplevel marketing… all the while building relationships with other high-level real estate entrepreneurs that will hopefully last a lifetime.
Thank you Spring 2018 CarrotCampers!
Enjoy!
Check out more CarrotCast episodes at carrotcast.com. Join us for CarrotCamp Fall 2018…
CarrotCamp provides an opportunity for real estate entrepreneurs to build relationships, break down the most important fundamentals to be successful, and reenergize. Listen how CarrotCamp Spring 2018 helped this great bunch of people…
1:45 – Why David Wolf from Florida, chose to attend CarrotCamp and dive into who he is and his biggest takeaways from the week. 3:15 – From Salt Lake City, Dustin Gilbert, discusses what his current scale looks like, his team, and thinking more about building passion into his business. 7:10 – Facebook Marketing Master, Kiley Newbold also talks about passion and finding that business vehicle that feeds that passion. 9:35 – From Miami, Brandy Pollack, just closed his first deal via Carrot and he talks about the “ah-ha” moment during camp. 10:55 – Michael Stansbury and Jamison Hendricks from Memphis reveal the value they achieved during this real estate investing mastermind. 13:10 – Tim Ittenbach needed a chance to get away and reenergize to escape some tunnel vision. CarrotCamp provided that release. Tim is now excited to get back to the Indianapolis area and start implementing all of what he learned during camp. 15:50 – Seth Carlsen, Sacramento, came to camp to build relationships and learn more to craft his skills. Listen to what he took away from the time here. 17:00 – Richmond VA, Forrest McGhee, discusses why he came all the way across the county and how he will be challenging himself both personally and professionally when he returns home. 19:00 – Ben Souchek, from Lincoln NB, why he came and what he walked away with. The interaction with other successful investors, the team, and learning to pull himself out of his business more. 20:15 – One of the largest homebuyers in the nation, Brad Chandler from Express Homebuyers, joined CarrotCamp latest minute. Get his take on how to extract yourself from your business to free up time for passions beyond real estate investing. 21:25 – Ben’s expectations of the caliber of people who would be at camp and if those expectations were met. 22:10 – Why Brad decided to come to camp. 23:00 – Matt Bristow is an up-and-comer from Lodi CA. He talks about his journey into real estate and his invaluable education from camp.
LINKS & PAST CARROTCAST’S FROM THIS EPISODE
CarrotCamp Special Guest Kiley Newbold | Facebook Marketing Tips for Real Estate Investors + Agents: CarrotCast
CarrotCamp Special Guest Seth Buechley | The Secret To True Happiness For Ambitious Entrepreneurs:CarrotCast
[Recap] CarrotCamp Mountain Edition 2017 MARKETING + COMMUNITY + ADVENTURE:CarrotCast
Episode 100! Recapping Some of the Most Invaluable Episodes to Make A Bigger Impact In Your Life And Business: CarrotCast
Listen to the CarrotCast Podcast and Subscribe Below!
I want to say I’m grateful… Trevor Mauch
This is our 100th CarrotCast!
In the beginning, I didn’t even want to start a podcast. I thought it would be too difficult and daunting trying to provide consistently valuable content to my audience. I thought it would take more time than it’s worth.
And yet, here we are. 😃
I’m glad I started because I would never have made it to episode 100 if I hadn’t done episode 1 or 3 or 5 or 50. In other words, life is a journey, business is a journey, and podcasts are a journey. Whatever you’ve started or dream of starting, this episode is dedicated to you, as a reminder to start and stick with it until it’s finished.
As they say, “Nothing ever finished that wasn’t started” and “It ain’t done til it’s done.”
So here’s to the start of many things and the continuation of many more. Listen to find out what I’ve learned along my four-year journey at Carrot.
It’s been a wild ride.
And seriously, thanks for listening. You make this CarrotCast podcast worth doing.
Listen to the CarrotCast Podcast
[podcast-subscribe]
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Get Fired Up to Make a Bigger Impact in Your Life and Your Business. Listen to This Episode of the CarrotCast
3:25 – Why we started the CarrotCast, the 3 F’s of entrepreneurship, and Trevor’s 8 steps-to-success. 7:10 – How Carrot has been able to impact our member’s lives and the lives of our community. 14:50 – How to challenge yourself to create goals and blast through them. 20:30 – Why hiring a coach or finding a mentor can help 10x your life and income. 28:15 – Get Fired Up! How going all in and persevering through bad times have made Carrot member, Tyler Ford, successful. 36:30 – Investing in your own growth. Find out how much Trevor recommends spending on personal growth. 43:00 – How to build a strategy to plant seeds with the people you are most interested in learning from and helping. 45:00 – Be passionate about what you do in life. Go out and crush it!
We believe that people who take initiative can make the world a better place.
And in an effort to make the world just a little bit brighter, we recently kicked off an official Carrot Giving program where we’re committing at least 1% of our gross revenue to causes that embody our Core Values and are that beacon of positivity and possibility.
Each quarter our Carrot Culture Team (a rotating team each quarter) has a chance to deliver a check to their local food bank for 1/2 of that quarter’s donation pool… and our leadership team chooses a worthy cause for the other half.
This quarter we had a chance to donate over $13,000 to local causes that matter.
In this post we want to inspire you by sharing how our team served at our local food banks in several different cities and states, impacting hundreds of lives.
Dan Morris, one of our Customer Success Heroes, gave a $2,041 check to his local food bank on behalf of Carrot (which is equal to 10,205 meals or 68,000 pounds of Carrots).
Then, Dan toured their facility and helped sort cereal from a bulk delivery.
But it wasn’t just Dan that went on a servant-hearted adventure to his local food bank — Danni, Shaun, and Chris did as well.
Here’s Danni carrying the heaviest box of Carrots that the team bought (according to Chris).
Here’s Shaun carrying the second-heaviest bag of Carrots.
And here’s Chris carrying the third-heaviest bag of carrots (but with one hand, sooooooo….)
Then, Jen — our Minister of Magic for Random Tasks — took her kids to their local food bank to learn, donate, and serve.
All of this donating turned into more than 150,000 pounds of carrots to help feed people in unfortunate situations.
After their experiences, Dan said,
“That was a really cool experience. I got a full tour of the facilities, got to help sort cereal from a bulk delivery, talked to the Marketing Director and Donations Director. Filled out a giant check (how cool is that) !!! We just bought 10,000 meals for Spokane residents.”
And Jen said,
“Just wrapped up at the food pantry. It was a really cool experience and I think my kids got a lot out of it and learned a bunch. Especially Oliver. Really excited Carrot has given us this opportunity to do this in our communities it’s going to be so amazing long term. With all the different places we are gonna be able to touch, you guys. They were so thankful for the donation and it was just so cool to see how they are using the resources they have already and to hear that our donation will be put to such awesome uses.”
At Carrot, you — we — are part of something bigger. Yes, we design great websites. Yes, we help real estate entrepreneurs create the businesses of their dreams. Yes, we have a world-class support team that helps our customers.
What really matters, in the end, though, is that each of us is making the world just a little bit brighter with our donation — whether it be food, service, kindness, or Carrots. :-)
Over the past 4 years, we’ve grown Carrot from a fledgling “real estate investor website” software into the most effective tool for generating leads online for real estate investors. Bringing in more online leads than any other platform, climbing well into the millions of leads across thousands of active Carrot clients all across the U.S., Canada, the UK, and even some successful clients as far off as South Africa.
While our main clients are house flippers/wholesalers, land investors, and other investors looking for motivated sellers, cash buyers, and tenant leads… we’ve found the clients who consistently get an edge in this competitive market are the ones who are also real estate agents.
Why? Well for a few reasons.
Listing on the market is a viable solution for more sellers in up markets. Agent/Investors can turn more leads into income vs. discarding great leads that don’t perfectly fit just that one box.
Giving house sellers multiple options (list with us or sell to us) helps improve the close ratio and build trust with sellers.
Agents have access to data and tools that non-agents don’t.
In competitive markets that are cluttered with competition, you’ve got to do everything you can to avoid being caught up in the clutter of options.
Does Your Real Estate Agent Website Leave You Lost In The Clutter?
When you look at most real estate agents websites most of them tend to do the same things.
They have…
A pretty picture of you somewhere on the site
Local MLS listings
Fancy calculators and tools
… and a bunch of generic content for buyers and sellers not unique to your expertise as an agent
When buyers and sellers are looking at their options, if every agent they look at all has only the usual things on their websites (those things above) it’s the agents that build trust, authority, and credibility with content that win out in a competitive market.
Are you standing out with your website and content online or just becoming part of the clutter?
One lost listing per year from an underperforming website can cost you what? $3,000? $5,000? $20,000?
How AgentCarrot Can Help You Stand Out From The Clutter
Introducing Carrot real estate agent websites.
For years the way Carrot clients began to dominate their markets online started with a highly optimized website (for SEO and lead conversion) then amplified with our content marketing tools and training. We’ve been in the beta phase with Carrot for the past year and now we’re rolling it out of beta with a crazy exciting vision on how we’ll continue to improve how real estate agents and investors grow your business leveraging the web.
Now we’re bringing that same technology and strategy to real estate agents to dominate the online conversation in your own market. To leverage your own unique expertise to stand out from the clutter so you’re the best viable option for your ideal client in your market.
How does AgentCarrot help you do that? Let’s dive in and check out some of the ways AgentCarrot will help you save time and stand out from other agents in your market who are all doing the “same ol’ things”.
Beautiful High Converting Website Designs + Optional IDX
Nearly 60% of the 10s of thousands of leads our clients pull in each month are on mobile devices. So we’ve taken a mobile-first design approach… ensuring that your website not only looks beautiful and converts well on the desktop… but especially on mobile devices.
Beautiful Featured Property Listings
With AgentCarrot you can create Featured Property Listings to really showcase your best listings with any content you want to add. You’re never limited to what the MLS shows on a property when you create a Featured Property inside of AgentCarrot.
List MLS Properties With Our Optional IDX Add-On
Want to show local MLS listings on your site so buyers and sellers can discover what’s on the market? Excellent! Simply add-on IDX inside of your Carrot account starting at just $50/mo for most agents. All MLS listing content is housed on your website URL not on 3rd party URLs, which helps with SEO for those properties in Google.
Build Confidence In Your House Sellers
House sellers want just 3 things.
To sell for the highest possible price
With as little hassle as quickly as possible
To trust the agent they’re working with can represent them better than anyone else
The content you have on your website is key to building that expertise and trust. A robust “About” page, educational content (videos are best!), and a simple way for a seller to engage with you is critical. Just dive in and customize your content easily then leverage our content tools (below) to really stand out.
Stand Out With Content With VideoPost & Our Content Marketing System
The #1 way to stand out in a competitive market when almost every agent offers a similar core service (we can list or sell a house, here are our fees, etc.) is with content that builds your expertise and introduces your personality and core values to your clients.
If you’re struggling to win listings or buyers outside of your direct network of friends, family, and referrals it’s likely because you’re not standing out from other agents.
When your buyers and sellers are researching online you have a HUGE opportunity to get in front of them and build your expertise with content on your website optimized to rank well in Google.
Next time you’re out at a property or driving around with a client, pull out your cell phone and record a 3 to 5-minute video. Upload that to YouTube then simply paste the video URL into VideoPost in your AgentCarrot account. Then VideoPost will turn it into a written piece of content for your website.
Automate Weekly Content With Our Content Marketing System
Google LOVES robust written content and your buyers and sellers are searching online every day looking for answers to their questions before they make those big housing decisions. But writing content can take time and sometimes it’s hard to come up with ideas on what to write about.
The AgentCarrot Content Marketing System was the first automated blogging feature to launch in the real estate market in early 2014 and we’ve built that out for agents as well.
Simply select from our professionally written content each month, schedule it, and publish it. Now when buyers and sellers visit your website there will always be content written to educate and convert site visitors into leads.
Manage Your Leads
Carrot has always focused on being the best in the world at helping real estate professionals attract and convert more visitors into leads. But this past year we’ve started adding resources to help our clients better manage their leads inside of Carrot. Our simple Lead Manager will help you keep track of your leads and where they are in the process.
You can add notes, bring in your team members to collaborate, and see important property info such as where it is on Google Maps and Streetview plus the latest sale information from Zillow for quick reference.
Or integrate with dozens of systems through Zapier so AgentCarrot can help you capture more leads and you can use your current systems to manage those leads if you wish.
We have major updates we’re already working on for 2018 to make the Lead Manager more and more robust.
Track Your Progress
As you drive traffic to your website you can leverage our built-in stats or if you want to, can integrate with Google Analytics.
Then see where every lead came from with our LeadSource tracking. To take it even further and drill down on what’s working with your paid marketing with our Campaign Tracking Links tool.
Leverage Our Expertise
As you dive in and leverage our tools to build a beautiful real estate agent website and stand out with content, you can turn to our training and team to guide you through to success. From our weekly LIVE Coaching Calls every Tuesday (included in all AgentCarrot memberships) to our online training programs, and our amazing support team you’ll never be left hanging.
Our weekly Coaching Calls can help you stay on course and always have a plan that you or your team can execute.
What’s Next For Carrot Real Estate Agent Websites
While real estate agent websites is a new product here at Carrot, we’re not new to helping high-achieving real estate professionals cut through the online clutter and generate more leads online. Millions of seller, buyer, and tenant leads have passed through our system and we only plan for that to get even better for our InvestorCarrot and AgentCarrot clients.
But we’re excited as heck about our vision for Carrot over the coming 12-24 months.
We’re going to…
Further build out the functionality of our lead manager and follow-up systems
Innovate more content marketing tools to help you stand out from the crowd
Build out training specific for real estate agents that put you at the cutting edge of online marketing
Test and hone our designs and Lead Conversion Process for our websites
Test and innovate how you and your clients use Carrot mobile devices
… to help you save time and cut through that clutter in your market as a real estate agent.
Here at Carrot, we feel every high-achieving real estate agent should be an investor and every high-achieving investor should also be an agent (or align with one). So we’ll continue our focus on helping you earn an amazing living in real estate with less time and create a business of purpose along the way.
Last but not least, we want your feedback.
We understand we have a long way to go and are nowhere near our ultimate vision for AgentCarrot. If you see anything we can improve or a wishlist, or simply want to give us feedback… please don’t hesitate to send it our way.
Land is hot right now. I was talking with one of our Carrot members recently and they’re seeing a really great opportunity to sell land all across the country. So, we worked with them to create a Land Sellerwebsite system here at Carrot! Here’s how it works…
Introducing Our New Land Seller Websites for Motivated Seller Lead Generation
Over a few-month period, we researched and tested websites in some select markets to create our first version of a performing-based land seller website that you as our Carrot members can access and set up in your accounts.
We’ve kept these land seller websites simple… but effective. We’re actively testing the sites, for instance, and will be adding elements that help increase conversion rates each and every month.
We’ve taken our proven design with what we call the “Lead Hero” that we have by default on all of our websites (but you can turn the Lead Hero on or off with the click of a mouse if you want) and built that into the land seller websites as well. We’ve found that when we have a Lead Hero on our customer’s homepages… the homepage conversion rate increased across the board.
Plus… we’ve built in the Conversion Boosters that are baked into all of our Carrot real estate investor websites that improve opt-ins, engagement with website visitors, and credibility.
Designed For Results
When most people start building their first website, they care about one thing and one thing only: how pretty does the website look?
Over the years, though, we found that results matter more than looks. In fact, that’s all that should matter in the design of your website.
Then, once we find things that work, our design team takes the baton, creating elegant and clean formats while at the same time retaining the current conversions (or ideally increasing website conversions even more!).
The Content
Like all of our website content packs, the content is professionally written by people who know SEO, website conversion, and real estate strategy inside and out.
The mistake most people make when building their real estate website is that they underestimate the power of content. Words on pages can make or break the results of your website in search engines and how well your website performs once a visitor arrives.
Every page on this new land seller website in our system is written with four factors in mind:
Search Engine Optimization – We’ve done extensive research to find out what motivated land sellers are searching on Google to find the land buyers. Then we’ve built those keywords into this content strategically and we customize it with YOUR CITY automatically when you create your website in our system. This and our other SEO elements help your website have a better chance of ranking higher in search engines to attract more motivated land sellers.
Lead Conversions – If you’re able to get land sellers to your website but they aren’t giving you their information, your website isn’t doing its job. Content and pages are made to convert. That way we position our opt-in boxes, the words on our calls to action, the “eye direction” elements that make the visitor’s eye go to the parts of your website that matter — it’s all built into our land websites.
Customized and Customizable – While your website will be 100% ready to roll from the second you launch the website in your Carrot account — just like any of our websites within the Carrot system — you can customize anything about your content that you want to. We actually encourage our members to add some twists to their website content to make it feel personal to you and what your business does. Plus, we’ve automatically customized part of your website content with your company name, contact info, and the city you invest in. So website visitors will know they’re on a trusted, LOCAL investor website.
Credibility Boosters – Credibility is huge when generating leads in any business. The ideal way to build credibility and trust with your motivated land sellers is by making your website feel like you’re a real person. There is an “About Us” page already created for you that you can customize if you want to, plus we’ve integrated some trust symbols into your websites to help increase trust on your pages.
One of the big reasons our members LOVE Carrot so much is the quality and effectiveness of our website content and how much time they save by just leveraging our content and our writers rather than spending a painful amount of hours writing the content for their own website.
NOTE: All of our website content is Copyright Protected and for the use ONLY for active Carrot members, and may not be copied in all or part on another website. Any Copyright infringements will be taken seriously. We appreciate you being cool and playing by the rules.
The SEO
Just like our other websites, we’ve done the search engine keyword research to find out what motivated land sellers are actually typing into Google. Then, we’ve built our content and pages around those phrases that people are already looking for.
Plus, we make this even easier for SEO novices to help your content rank higher with our Carrot “SEO Assistant.” If you can read a traffic signal, you can optimize your pages for the search engines with our SEO tools.
The Lead Capture Process
One thing we’ve discovered in our years of lead generation experience (over 1,000,000 real estate industry leads and counting) is that the majority of your website visitors won’t convert (give you their information) immediately because they need a bit more information to trust you and give you their information.
Because of this, we’ve built in multiple places for your website visitors to engage in the content and convert as a lead when they’re ready.
And like all of the pages we create, they’re all based on the continual testing we’re doing to increase the effectiveness of our pages in converting website visitors into leads.
How To Launch Your Own Land Seller Websites To Attract Motivated Sellers With Carrot
If you’re a Carrot member, you can get your own Land website up and live in a few seconds.
Select the new “Land Seller” website in the “Create A Website” list.
Name your site and click “Create Your Site”.
That’s it!
Now you can log in and customize your website, attach a domain to it if you want, and get to work!
Not An Carrot Member Yet? Join Below!
If you’re not a Carrot member but want to leverage our tools, our system, our marketing knowledge, and our support to help you generate more leads to your real estate business… awesome! Simply take a demo or click the link below to get started!
My name is Mike and I work for the best company in the world…
![[New Feature] Use This Hero Customizer To Differentiate your Website and Increase Conversions](https://image-cdn.carrot.com/uploads/Featured-Image-102.png)
![[New Feature] Use This Hero Customizer To Differentiate your Website and Increase Conversions](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/k6H0SLVQ0QI/maxresdefault.jpg)
![[NEW] Motivated Land Seller Websites](https://image-cdn.carrot.com/uploads/Featured-Image-71.png)
Land is hot right now. I was talking with one of our Carrot members recently and they’re seeing a really great opportunity to sell land all across the country. So, we worked with them to create a Land Seller website system here at Carrot! Here’s how it works…
Just like our other websites, we’ve done the search engine keyword research to find out what motivated land sellers are actually typing into Google. Then, we’ve built our content and pages around those phrases that people are already looking for.
