Category: Inbound Marketing

Video Marketing For Real Estate Investor Websites: Good Idea or Bad?
Video marketing can generate huge traffic and great conversions, or… it can suck the life right out of your message.

Welcome to another edition of the Carrot Test Kitchen… where we break down our recipes and show you how to create insanely great lead generation sites for your real estate business.

Today’s post will tell you how to set up a great, low-cost video marketing campaign that (if it’s done right) can really help move your business forward.

Fortunately, it’s really easy to add video to your InvestorCarrot site… and to get some great benefits from Google’s traffic at the same time.

In this post I’ll show you how to add video to your InvestorCarrot sites, plus give you a great example of a video to watch right now… and tell you what *not* to do.

First, why does video marketing matter to real estate investors?

Video marketing is particularly important for real estate investors, because when you use it properly, it can really help to grow your business.

Think of your video like an automated salesperson for your business… once you record that video, it can be played again and again to anyone who is looking for your services, day or night, on weekends and holidays… without the bother of an interrupting phone call, while eliminating the hassle of having to say the same thing again and again.

A great video is more than just a commercial for your business – it builds trust for a great beginning to your relationship with a new client.

A great YouTube marketing video sets the stage for negotiations by showing off your credibility and describing how you do business.

A truly great marketing video helps the viewer to trust you, like you, and want to do business with you.

On the flip side, a bad video can really turn people off.

If you’re showing your potential clients a cheesy video that’s heavily scripted with obvious sales language, loaded with stock photography and drowning in clip art, what are they supposed to think about you and your business?

To put it another way…

If you never show someone your own voice and use your own face, how are they supposed to trust you?

See, here’s where real estate investment is very different from a household product that’s advertised on the television.

If you’re selling something like shampoo or root beer, you don’t have to convince the consumer that you’re trustworthy or credible… just that the shampoo will bring you that silky, luxurious hair you’ve been wanting, or that this root beer will deliver more delicious flavor than any root beer they’ve ever had.

When you’re selling products, trust can really help… but it’s not essential.

But when you’re trying to convince someone to let you buy their property or sell them an investment, trust is utterly critical. It’s everything. Without trust, you don’t have a deal.

And yet I see so many real estate investment companies using these terrible little $5 videos they bought online, probably late at night after a few drinks… and now they’re probably wondering why no one is watching and why their business isn’t growing.

Would you want a $5 salesperson to represent your business?

In most big companies, the top salesperson is the second-highest-paid in the company… right after the CEO.

Sales is the life blood of businesses. Without sales, there is no revenue, and without revenue, your company will die.

Exactly why would you trust a $5 sales video with the life blood of your business?

Don’t get me wrong… I don’t think you need to spend a ton of money on making a video in order for it to be effective.

In fact, we’ve found that most real estate customers are turned off by flashy marketing loaded with gimmicks. They really are just looking for a credible, trustworthy person to help them take care of business.

You really don’t need to do more than just talk into a webcam to make a decent sales video.

These few things will help you to make a great video marketing piece:
- High quality audio (i.e. a great microphone)
- High quality video (i.e. a decent camera)
- Good lighting
- Nice setting
- Clean editing
You can find someone in most cities who already has the equipment and pay them for a few hours of help… generally under $500 can get you a handful of pretty good short videos.

If you’ve got the budget you should definitely be hiring great people to make your videos even better.

Want to see an example of a decent low-cost marketing video?

Check this out:

They’ve got almost 10,000 views on that video, wow!

Their other video has a more reasonable view count – 352.

What I like about this couple is that they’re showing off themselves – sure, they’ve dressed up to film the video and put on their best smiles, but it’s genuine and authentic.

Side note – I checked out their site, and there are a lot of reasons their site won’t get very many conversions… it’s got good credibility, but it makes it hard for folks to sign up for the offer… those folks need to Watch the InvestorCarrot Demo and make the switch! Any of our affiliates know these folks and want to sign them up? :~)

But they did the smart thing of actually using the description on YouTube to pull traffic over to their site by using links and a lot of the most commonly used search terms. Since Google owns YouTube, the videos will show up at the top of the search (even if their site isn’t ranked that high), so this can be a great way to get traffic to your site

Plus, it looks like they got a few of their friends to comment and share the video (which helps to boost credibility/

Those are all really great video marketing practices!

Now let me show you how easy it is to add a video to your InvestorCarrot site from YouTube.

First, get the video up on YouTube and copy the link to the video.

In another window, open up the post or page where you want to embed the video.

Then click the snazzy little “Embed Video” button.

This nifty little window will pop up, and just paste the YouTube (or Vimeo) link into the form.

That’s it! How simple was that?

If you’ve got any questions: A full tutorial is available for Carrot Members here.

And if you’re not already a Carrot Member, check out the reasons you should be! Watch our Demo Video right now!
April 21, 2014
How Real Estate Investors Can Dominate Local Search to get 58.2% of Motivated Seller Traffic

Want to dominate your local market?

We’re getting ready to launch our Market Domination Plan, so in today’s post we want to share a few of the strategies already being used by top investors around the country to get the majority of Motivated Seller leads in their local markets to them (instead of their competitors).

Of course, these strategies can be used to get leads for Cash Buyers, Private Lenders, Rent-to-Own Tenants, or other target audiences, but Motivated Sellers are the hardest – at least right now.

As you probably know, inventory is a big challenge around the country. Most investors I talk to are having a pretty easy time growing their lists… as long as they have inventory. The ones who don’t have properties to sell are struggling to catch up.

Why is it so tough to get inventory?

In most markets, it’s not too hard to sell a property. There are tons of investors and retail buyers competing for a limited amount of homes.

Pure and simple: in lots of US markets, demand is high and supply is low.

But don’t get me wrong – there is still an incredible amount of opportunity out there. It’s just getting tougher every day to capture it in some of the biggest markets.

That’s why we came up with the Market Domination Plan – to help those investors who are already succeeding and are ready for growth.

Market domination starts with capturing organic search traffic.

Like it shows in the chart below, 91.5% of search traffic comes from page 1.

SEO for real estate investors is really important for your business! We can help you out. If you’re looking to move up in your rankings, we can help – just click the image above to find out more about our SEO service.

Now, keep in mind that the data is from thousands of websites, not just real estate ones… we’ve found there’s actually some great traffic that comes in off of positions 2 and 3, not just #1 – but really, when we’re taking on SEO clients our goal is to get within the top 5 positions for our targeted keywords.

We only start with 3 keywords, because it doesn’t make sense to over-optimize a site for too many keywords – plus it just takes too long to see results when you’re diluting your efforts all over the place.

“We have 2 new ones under contract probably 5 waiting in seller signatures. Doing ppc under our carrot site and your SEO do we should continue to get more and more leads.” Guillermo Coronado

Most investors don’t achieve any big share of the market because they’re diluting their efforts all over the place… great marketing really requires not only a strategic plan, but a great deal of focus and commitment to implement the plan.

Most folks give up on a method before it even has a chance to work… or they fail to do the right research before they start implementing. Either mistake can crush the ROI right out of a great campaign.

But let’s assume that you’ve already ranked your site high on all the major terms… is that enough to crush out the competition?

Nope, sorry…. you’ve got to occupy the prime real estate from more than just one site if you’re going to dominate that market – and shut out other investors from grabbing the leads.

Here’s what that looks like:

Cyndy is generating hundreds of leads with her Carrot sites… click that image to go see Trevor’s deep-dive Case Study to learn what she’s doing to dominate her market

As you can see from that image above, on one of Cyndy’s search terms in her market, she’s ranked in 4 out of the 5 top slots.

Two of those are YouTube videos she’s made and ranked, and another one is a Facebook page.

Plus she’s also operating 8 other websites that are ranking well in her market.

(Sidenote: Cyndy’s converting those over to InvestorCarrot now, because she tests everything… and she found out that her InvestorCarrot site was converting much better than all the other sites she’d spent a ton of time on…. if you don’t have an InvestorCarrot site yet, you can launch a new site in just a few minutes <– go see for yourself right now).

How did this successful real estate investor swarm her market?

Cyndy was smart and she implemented a ton of great strategies to capture online traffic from lots of sources, including Google, YouTube, Facebook and more.

We tell you all you need to know to get great results in our powerful real estate lead generation training program, and in our new Craigslist training program we’ve included great info (along with ads and much more) about the Market Swarm Strategy that Cyndy designed and has been using so well to get results in her market.

Cyndy also uses other methods, like direct mail and signs… as a smart investor, she’s working on nurturing her leads from a lot of different directions, and doing a lot of great marketing.

Great real estate marketing like this takes a lot of time, energy and commitment.

I really admire Cyndy for taking such a strategic approach – and her willingness to share with other investors to help them learn!

How Real Estate Investors Can Dominate Local Search in 3 Steps

Step 1:

Get signed up for InvestorCarrot, launch a Motivated Seller site, learn all about SEO, and rank high.

Step 2:

Drive traffic to your site by posting good content on YouTube, Facebook, Craigslist and other sites.

Step 3:

Create awesome stories and reports to get media attention along with great links.

(Sorry folks, I didn’t say it was gonna be easy… just that it was gonna be 3 steps to Market Domination).

In all seriousness, it’s a ton of work to implement a great content marketing strategy.

But the payoff is huge.

I’ve been doing a ton of research into the search traffic, competition, and PPC costs around the country on behalf of our clients… plus I’ve created a really cool report comparing the top 150+ metro regions around the country.

In fact, I created a unique way to measure each market called the CarrotScore… and I’ve also found the Top 20 Most Overlooked Markets (according to huge amounts of Google’s data that I extracted and crunched across 170 spreadsheets – this report took me weeks of hard work).

I can tell you firsthand that most of the major markets in the US are extremely competitive… people are investing loads of money to get the leads that are coming in from local search.

Some of our clients (like Cyndy) are totally into doing all the hard work to create this stuff from scratch, and we love it… being able to offer up her strategies and Craigslist program has already helped a bunch of our customers generate lots of leads:

“We put up 3 or 4 Craigslist ads right after we got the first part of the P2P program, and we’ve been slammed! We’ve gotten so many leads this week – 15 rent-to-own, 36 new buyers, and a bunch of motivated sellers too!” – Michael Mackay

But some of the best real estate coaches out there will tell you that you shouldn’t be doing so much of your own marketing work… that you need to be focusing on honing your negotiation and acquisition skills, not spending your time implementing your SEO.

We’d love to help you dominate your market… so get started with our SEO program now!

If you’re a Carrot member, join us for our weekly webinar – we’re gonna dive in deep to the Market Domination Strategy, and I’ll show you a special sneak peek at the in-depth research I’ve been doing.

March 16, 2014
Why The “2-Step Opt-In Process” Increases Conversions and Lead Quality By Up To 46% On Real Estate Investor Websites

Welcome to another edition of the Carrot Test Kitchen… where we break down our recipes and show you how to create insanely great lead generation sites for your real estate business.

Our sites get insanely high conversion rates… you just have to customize them to your business and your local market, then send traffic to them! (Don’t worry, we’ll show you how – it’s easier than you think. :)

(Of course, this stuff is baked right into our sites, and our prices are so low that it’s impossible to do it cheaper yourself… if you’re not already a member, head over and check out our demo right now).

Today we’re gonna show ya the exact trick that improved conversions by 46% right when we started implementing it years ago.

It’s so simple that once you learn it, you get it… in fact, I bet you’ve seen versions of it used before. While we didn’t invent it, we’re perfecting it for real estate investors.

It’s called the 2 Step Opt-In Process, and I’ll tell you how it works and what you need to know to make money from it.

The first step of the opt-in process happens on the Lead Page – there are many lead pages built into every InvestorCarrot website, and you can create unlimited additional Lead Pages. It’s super cool.

Step 1: Research Shows A Form With 4 Or Fewer Opt-In Fields Increases Opt-Ins On The Front End

Below is an example of a lead page on a Cash Buyer site on the InvestorCarrot system. It’s a great landing page for advertisements on Craiglist, Backpage, Zillow, Google, Adroll or many other sites and converts consistently high across our member’s sites too. :

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: All of the content on our websites are 100% Copyright protected and owned by our company. Only active paying InvestorCarrot members can use the content on our websites. If we find people copying our content off of our customer’s websites or from our images on this page, we will pursue violators for copyright infringement.

As you can see, there are only a few quick questions to answer – name, email, phone and type of investor.

Lots of testing has shown that 3-4 form fields are ideal for conversions – any more or less actually drops the rate of performance. This graph from HubSpot’s research on over 70,000 forms shows why 3 is the magic number for conversions:

Want to Increase Your Leads? Make your first opt in form have 4 or fewer fields. – Source for Graph: HubSpot

We’ve tested the number of things our forms ask for on the first opt in box for both buyers and sellers… and once you start to get past 3-4 on your first form… your conversion rates go way down.

You’ll see lots of real estate investor websites that are killing their conversions by asking for way too much information on the first chance.

Like this one…

Too Many Fields Kills Conversion: This particular form we found on a random real estate investor motivated seller website has 13 fields. How many does yours have?

Can you imagine being a motivated seller who really needs to sell… but just isn’t ready to give up all of your info quite yet on this first form… yet almost every field on that form is required for you to get to the next step?

However, when a motivated seller does submit this form… you know that they’re VERY QUALIFIED.

Long forms are terrible for conversion… but increase the quality of your leads.

So we melded the two into…

Step 2: The Best Of Both Worlds – High Conversions AND Qualified Leads

A short-form upfront to increase lead conversion… and a long-form on the second step to increase your lead quality.

To get the highest conversion and the most qualified leads (the ultimate goal), the key in the 2-step opt-in process is a short and sweet “Step 1” form… that leads to a longer more qualifying “Step 2” form.

Once the buyer (or seller) completes the first form… the shorter form, he or she will see a more detailed Buyer Profile to fill out before seeing the properties. This Buyer Profile Form further qualifies the buyers. The same goes on our motivated seller websites… we have a short form upfront that gets the lead… then a longer form on the back that qualifies the lead further:

Hidden Elements: There are many “under the radar” strategies being used on this form that you probably don’t even notice that further qualify the lead and increase conversions. For instance, notice that we’ve strategically made some fields “required” and some not required. Why? We reveal this kind of deep strategy to our InvestorCarrot members on our weekly LIVE coaching calls with our CEO Trevor. Not a member? Join :-)

COPYRIGHT NOTE: Again, please be creative and write your own content. The content above is owned and written by InvestorCarrot… and only available for use by our active paying members. We actively monitor the internet to find people infringing on our copyright and pursue action. We have to do this to protect our active members and the investment they and we have made. If you’d like to leverage our system, our content, see our pricing and plans and come aboard, we’d love to have ya!

Do People Actually Fill Out A Form This Long You Ask?

We get pushback from many InvestorCarrot members who want to change this step 2 form because they think it asks for too much info and the buyers and sellers won’t fill it out.

Our answer to that is this… we’ve tested it… and it works.

Here’s real-life data to prove the way we’ve set up OUR Step 2 forms (every word and every line on our forms and the other words on the page that the forms sit on… which isn’t shown above… are crafted and tested to increase conversions… and your leads).

93% Of Cash Buyers Filled Out The “Step 2” Form

93% of Buyers Filled Out The Step 2 Form: In this screenshot on an Carrot members cash buyer website 93% of every cash buyer who filled out the first form went on to also fill out the 2nd longer form. It’s no accident… the way we craft our 2 step opt-in process plain works.

99% Of Motivated Sellers Filled Out The “Step 2” Form

99% Of Motivated Sellers Filled It Out: It works even better with motivated sellers.

Again, it’s not just the fact of having 2 steps that’ll optimize your conversions and quality of your leads… it’s what you ask for on your forms and how you frame that “Step 2” form on your page that makes it work.

If you’re an InvestorCarrot member, rest assured… this is already built right into all of your websites (your seller websites, cash buyer, rent to own, apartment rental, main company, etc.).

Years ago, we found that the 2-Step Opt-In Process improved conversions by 46%… with dramatically improved lead quality.

We’ve been using 2-Step Opt-Ins on all of our sites ever since.

If you’re trying to build a real estate investing website from scratch to capture seller and buyer leads for your real estate investment business, you’re probably missing a few other key aspects of the formula that allows us to get insanely high lead capture rates for our members.

Want to just leverage our research and our platform and save time and money?

Join InvestorCarrot below… all of our websites come pre-built with the “2 Step Opt-In Process”.

Want to see what else Carrot’s sites can do? Watch the demo now!

Are you a paying Carrot Member wanting to improve your marketing results?

Join our Live Coaching Call <– click<<<<<<

Each week we answer specific questions from our members to help them solve their toughest marketing challenges.

Space is limited, so sign up now! It’s free for Carrot members.

If you’re not already a Carrot Member, joining is easy <—– Click that now to get started!

March 9, 2014
REVEALED: Your Real Estate Website is NOT Responsive? You’re Losing Up To 40% Of Your Leads

This is a Carrot Test Kitchen post – that’s where we break down the secrets of lead generation (building traffic & converting) to help YOU grow your real estate investment business.

UPDATED 2/24/14 with thanks to Chris Clothier from memphisinvest.com and new screenshots.

Is your real estate investor website mobile responsive? Having a responsive real estate investor website is important because of the types of devices users now have access to. If your website is not responsive then you need to find a template that is…quick.

In other words… Does your real estate investing website automatically adapt for the screen on the device that your customer is using to look great to the customer so they engage in your website more easily? Responsive optimized real estate investing websites are critical.

(Try our free test to instantly see how your website looks on mobile devices <— Click here)

Every year the % of searches online with mobile devices (cell phones, ipads, etc.) is growing… which means more and more of your website visitors are viewing your website on their phone! Is your website setup *correctly* to handle that? See how below…

Even though a huge amount of internet use is taking place on tablets, mobiles and other devices, a frightening amount of real estate investor websites aren’t responsive for mobile users.

Smartphone visits account for a huge share of the growth of the internet.

People are using their mobile devices more frequently for local search – and that matters a lot for real estate investors.

Google says that 40% of mobile searches are local in nature, which seems obvious once you think about it. People are using their phones to access information while they’re out and about. That trend is going to continue rising, and fast.

If your real estate website is set up to convert well, it can easily capture leads from someone who is searching while stuck in their car, waiting in line, or killing a few spare minutes before a meeting.

Plus, more and more people ditch getting a full on computer for their house and just use their cell phone to browse the internet and check their email.

Too many real estate investor websites are losing huge amounts of conversions just by not being ready for them.

So back to the main question…

If you’re not, you should be checking out the InvestorCarrot demo video right now.

But don’t worry… you’re not alone on optimizing for a responsive real estate investing websites.

I’ll use an example from a really smart and successful investor now – just to show that even great real estate investors aren’t optimized for mobile.

This guy has already been named to Inc’s 500 list and is one of Tennessee’s fastest growing businesses, so he’s doing a lot of things right. He’s working really hard to build an awesome business, and it shows.

((My thanks to Chris Clothier from memphisinvest.com – I just spoke to him about using his site as an example… and he’s right, it would have been more polite for me to ask permission first… I have never been good at asking first, but I’m trying to get better, so here’s my apologies along with my thanks to him for being a good sport.))

His site’s template isn’t responsive… it doesn’t automatically adjust the layout to make it easier for mobile phone users, which may or may not (depending on their device) be able to play the video on his home page.

His site’s menus will be very difficult to use on a touch screen, and chances are good that he’ll lose any mobile users who may have been interested in his products and services.

Just to be fair, Chris does have a nice looking website – here’s a desktop photo below.

There’s a few things I’d change to make it convert better, make it mobile optimized (obviously) and things like adding a first-step opt-in form to capture email addresses right on the front page before going to a longer form (that’s a feature we’ve used to get huge conversion rates on our cash buyer sites, but I’ll save that for another post).

Most important takeaway for sites like Chris’: make an offer on the front page with a short form to capture basic info. If someone only has a few moments to access your site, make it very simple and clear. Chris is primarily targeting investors, so access to investment properties or a free report would probably convert well right on that main site.

Here’s an example of one of our mobile optimized real estate investor sites that’s converting really well with a clear call to action:

As you can see, the call to action is clear and they’re taking some basic contact info on the main page… once a buyer opts in, that person will be taken to a second page that collects just a little more information on the buyer… that’s a opportunity to qualify accredited investors who are willing to “raise their hands” during that second step of the process.

Now let’s see how that translates to the mobile optimized screen:

As you can see above, the page has automatically changed its layout… because the site is mobile optimized, like all InvestorCarrot sites. There is a clear call to action at the top that is easily legible and clickable: “Join our Hot Properties List Here”, plus a “navigation” menu and the ability to keep scrolling.

Here’s what the navigation menu looks like when clicked:

As you can see, the choices fill the screen so it’s easy for a mobile user to click the options (instead of having to pull-zoom and click really small links, which usually ends up in a frustrated user… and frustrated users don’t opt-in, they leave.

And if a visitor to the site scrolls down past the navigation menu, they’ll get to an easy form to get access to the properties:

As you can see, the Call to Action at the bottom is clear and it fills up the screen, plus the form is short – only 4 choices, easy to fill out on a mobile device. This website will help convert mobile visitors into actual customers and leads… not bounce them away in frustration.

Want to see how your site looks on mobile devices?

Ready to take your business to the next level?

Get a mobile responsive lead generation machine launched in just minutes:

Sign up for InvestorCarrot ← Watch the demo now!

February 24, 2014
How Affiliate Marketers Can Use the Storytelling Secrets of Pixar to Make Money
Quick Note – Our Affiliate Contest is Taking Off! There’s a few people leading the pack, but there’s plenty of room for you to jump in. Go check out the contest now – and if you’re not already an InvestorCarrot Affiliate, sign up here – it’s fast and free!

You know Pixar is the ONLY movie company never to take a loss, right?

All of their movies have been successes at the box office (although Cars 2 was kind of a dud, it still earned big $$$$).

Their secret storytelling formula was leaked and tweeted out, and when we saw it… whoa! It’s pure gold for anyone who is engaged in affiliate marketing – really, content marketing in general. You know why?

Storytelling is the key to successful sales.

No matter how good of a storyteller you are, you can always be better.

We’ve got a powerful video for you here… even tho the audio is pretty lame, the content is great.

In the time it takes to watch an episode of the Office, you could be lining up the strategy that will make you thousands of dollars – and help you win some cool stuff in our affiliate contest.

In this video you’ll learn:
- The exact formula Pixar has used to write every single movie they’ve made – (none of their movies have ever taken a loss – that’s a first in Hollywood)
- How to use Pixar’s character development tricks to create sales content that builds trust, credibility, and engages your audience more than ever before
- Fast, easy ways to get “unstuck” when you’ve got writers block and are struggling to put out that next content piece
- Why you should never ever try to make “perfect” content… and why you should always begin at the end to get the best results.
You’re not already signed up???

Join our Affiliate Program now!
February 18, 2014
[Real Estate Heat Map Results] Where Are Sellers Clicking On Your Real Estate Website

This article is the first in our Carrot Test Kitchen series – it’s a series of posts that help you to dissect the secret recipes we use to generate thousands of leads for real estate agents and investors across thousands of websites around the USA.

Ever heard of “real estate heat maps”? We’ll show you how motivated sellers interact with your website and how to make your website more effective…

Are you putting lots of effort into building a high-converting real estate website to pull in buyers, sellers or investors… but not getting the results you want?

There are two main problems that we often see on real estate sites:

1)   The site is getting no visitors, and

2)   The site’s visitors aren’t submitting their information.

The first problem is usually solved with SEO content when:

1)   The site doesn’t have good content,

2)   The content is not optimized to reach the search terms that people in the local market are actually using, or

3)   The site’s competitors are ranking higher in a search.

There are quite a lot of other tricks to boost traffic to your site, and we’ll be talking about that again real soon…. But today, I want to help you out with the second main problem we see:

What are people doing on your real estate website?

It’s critical that the design of your site is set up to actually convert visitors to leads.

Although it’s utterly crucial, conversions are often overlooked when average people are putting together their websites. Too often they hire designers who are obsessed with aesthetics… rather than results.

Those folks need to quit calling themselves marketing experts… because they’re artists. Most art doesn’t sell. It hangs there, looking pretty… but it’s not selling your business.

Are you trying to create art, or are you trying to get real estate leads?

Listen, I get in this argument with designers a lot… so please don’t send me a bunch of angry emails about how design matters… I know it matters. It’s just that it doesn’t matter if it’s pretty… it matters if it works. Like with my accountant – I don’t care if my accountant is pretty, I care about what happens if I get audited.

When you’re setting up your real estate site, it’s not how it looks… it’s how it works.

That’s the really cool thing about real estate heat maps – one of the many tools that we use at Carrot to test out our theories of web design… because we don’t even trust ourselves – we want to know that our system is built on proven data about what works before we commit your hard-earned cash – and more importantly before you shift the marketing of your business to our system. We know your business is super important to you… just like ours is to us.

So what’s a real estate heat map anyway, and how can you use it to generate more leads online???

Back to the point, thanks… in this context, a heat map is a generated picture of where visitors to the website move their mouse and where they click on the page.

Below I’m gonna put a few examples of a heat map that we generated for a user’s site, and give you a few key points on what works so well on this design.

Brittany sent us a quick email after watching one of our webinars, asking for help getting more leads… we were able to double her conversion rate with just a couple of simple changes that I’ll get to soon.

Check out these heat maps (the site is greyed out, with little points of light showing where people have lingered with their mouse or clicked – the “hotter” the click spot, the more often it’s clicked).

What did you notice on that heatmap?

See all of the bright spots? The Orange and Yellow spots are where a lot of people click… indicating things that the motivated sellers felt were really important.

…94% of clicks happen on the top of the page…

First off, 94% of clicks happen on the top of the page. The vast majority of web visitors to any given site don’t bother to scroll down – in fact, they make the decision to stay or go on to another site within 2.3 seconds.

Side note: That statistic is valid across websites in general – on our investment sites, we tend to get about 8 seconds per page on average – 4 times more engagement than average, but still a lightning-fast choice to stay or go. You only have microseconds to reach your target audience – just another reason that your content and design matter so much.

There are a few great lessons to learn right away from this click map….

1)   People are clicking in many spots. The clicks aren’t just happening in one spot… visitors to this real estate website are clicking through to find information that answers their questions. The site is designed to appeal to a specific audience (sellers), so it’s validating to know that different visitors to the site are finding what they’re looking for on the site – and then submitting their information.

2)   Titles matter a lot. Check out the title of the top menus – these titles are designed to appeal directly to people who need to sell. “We buy houses in Baltimore”, “Get A Cash Offer”, “Sell My House Fast” and a contact form right on the front page that asks people to put in their address, phone, and email first thing.

3)   Customers want to know about the company before they submit their info. Check out how red the spot over the testimonials is – not only are people clicking a lot on that page, but they’re thumbing through the testimonial mini-display on the bottom right of the page. Testimonials are a huge way to create credibility for your business… more on that in a minute.

Where is your credibility on your own real estate website?

It’s a really common problem that hurts a ton of great real estate agents and investors… when people get to the site they need to have a compelling reason to give over their personal information. Think about it… real estate is the largest investment most people ever make in their lives. There’s no piece of real estate more intimate than someone’s home.

And yet…

So many real estate sites don’t build trust or credibility.

In fact, there are 3 key factors that I wanna mention that are critical to successfully designing a site that converts – and I’ll tell you how we’ve used them to design the Carrot sites like this example that are generating great leads.

Credibility, Content, and Contact

Check out this graphic – I’ve broken down the links on the page into numbers, so you can see the percentage of page visitors that clicked on each link or form.

Even more great lessons here…

As you can see, 33% of the clicks are for Credibility, 24% is on the Content (which is written to develop trust and credibility while reducing the fear and anxiety that most people who need to sell now are feeling), and 43% of the clicks on the home page are actually converting – they’re contacting members using the forms.

Now, keep in mind that the percentages are recording just clicks on the home page – a lot of other conversions happen on the lead pages that we’ve optimized for the local market. That means that people are most often giving their info over to get a free report or another valuable tool… 43% of the clicks on the home page isn’t always the main source of leads. It just depends on how the site is being promoted, and where the majority of traffic is directed.

I really want to emphasize that the mix of those 3 factors is critical to a successful lead generation site.

Content pulls people through search engine traffic, but it has to create Credibility once people arrive… or they just won’t Contact you.

BONUS: 1 Minute Tweak That Doubled The Conversion Rate To Leads

One more thing… I promised that I’d tell you the simple fix that we did on this page that doubled conversions… it’s so crazy simple that we were totally surprised that it worked so well.

We increased the size of the bar that says “Click to Continue” on the opt-in form and changed the color to Orange.

Yup, that’s it.

When this Carrot member got in touch, her site was converting well… but she’d made the size of the Continue button pretty small and black… so we ran a split test – half of the visitors to the site saw the small button, and the other half saw the larger button (we also changed the color to yellow).

In just one month of running the test, visitors to the large-button site submitted their info twice as much as those who saw the small button. Wow!

Even after doing this stuff for years, it’s crazy to see what a big difference such a small change can make.

That’s why we’re constantly testing different sites. We love to learn the nitty-gritty details that make all the difference… we don’t rely upon assumptions, and we certainly don’t make our websites to be pretty – although we do think they look nice. Most important – we design them to be effective.

For marketing folks who love data, real estate heat maps are a fantastic tool.

This Is All Built Into Your Carrot Websites Already!

The beauty with everything we walked through in this post is that everything is already baked right into your Carrot websites. We’re constantly running tests with our members and making tweaks to improve how well our system works for you.

We get paid up to $6,000/mo by large companies to do this same kind of work for them… but you get this as part of your Carrot membership for no extra cost. Why? Simply because we believe in results over anything else and are continually improving our system to help you get better results.

Keep An Eye Out For More Articles Like This!

We’ll be posting lots more info on the tips, tricks, and techniques we use to improve SEO, conversions, and get great results for Carrot customers… so if you’re not already getting our emails, make sure you sign up now! And if you want a website that truly generates leads for your business, go check out our different member plans to join Carrot and leverage our marketing knowledge and testing to generate more leads for your own real estate investing company.

Not An Carrot Member? Take A Tour Of Our System >>

January 20, 2014
Sample Real Estate Investing Free Reports for Lead Generation – Ideas to grow your business
Need to generate leads for your real estate investing, wholesaling, or fix and flip business? Read on…

So, you want more leads for your real estate investing business? Or any business for that matter?

Great. You know the easiest way to generate leads as a real estate investor?

Offering something of value to your prospects for free… in exchange for their information.

In this article, we’re going to talk about using free reports as a lead generation tool for motivated sellers, cash real estate buyers, private lenders, and more.

Sample Real Estate Investing Free Reports

A free report can be on anything that will help your prospect get closer to their goal… while at the same time build credibility for you and get you closer to a sale.

Here are some topic ideas for free real estate investing reports you can use to generate leads online.

For Motivated Sellers:
- 5 Ways To Stop Or Avoid Foreclosure
- Why Sell To A Real Estate Investor?
- How To Repair Your Credit During A Foreclosure
- 5 Ways To Sell Your House Fast In Today’s Market
- 6 Ways To Increase The Value Of Your House Before You Sell
- How To Navigate The Probate Process: Selling An Inherited House The Easy Way
… those ideas are all geared to help the prospect get information on solving one specific problem. There are many many other topics you can write (or have someone else write) free reports on.

For Cash Real Estate Buyers:
- A Local Real Estate Market Report (investors eat these up. Offer this on your home page… just compile a new local real estate report every few months w/ free info you can find online or from your real estate agent)
- 4 Ways To Cashflow Invest In Today’s Real Estate Market
- How To Buy Investment Real Estate With Your IRA: The Pros, Cons, and What to Avoid
- How To Analyze A Real Estate Deal So You Never Lose A Penny On A Deal
For Private Lenders:
- An Unofficial Guide On Private Lending In Real Estate: What Is It, Pros, Cons, Risks, Rewards To Look For
- 3 Ways To Invest Passively In The Current Real Estate Market
You get the drift. Simple stuff… just good little guides that will help whoever you’re trying to attract get a bit closer to solving a problem or helping them reach a goal.

How To Write A Real Estate Investing Free Report

We actually provide our Carrot members 6 or so real estate investing free reports that you can use in your online lead generation (our members can even edit and customize the reports)… but if you’re not yet a Carrot member and want to create some great “free report” material to give away on your site… here are your options:
1. Bear down and write them yourself: Really, they don’t have to be long… 2 – 10 pages is good enough. Anyone can write a 2 page report… right? Just create a report title, determine what you want that report to do for you (i.e. – get a seller to call you), then start doing some research on Google to come up w/ the content to write about… then write for a couple hours. Done.
2. Hire someone to write the reports for you: You can go to websites like www.TextBroker.com, www.Guru.com, and others to have great content written for you pretty reasonably. A 5-page report on a topic like the ones we’ve lined out will probably only cost you about $50 – $100 or so for solid writing. If you want top shelf writing with good graphics… you’re probably looking no more than $200 – $300 or so. Pretty cheap in the whole scheme of things.
3. … or once again, shameless plug… but join Carrot and get access to ours :-)
What To Do With The Free Real Estate Lead Generation Reports When You Have Them?

Get them on your website, in your email signatures, etc.

Here are some examples of effective ways we’ve been generating leads with our free reports (and ones we’ve seen elsewhere that we know work well).

Example #1: On their website, they put these 2 free reports on the page. One is a home sellers guide and the other about ways to stop foreclosure. Simple enough eh? And it works great. Then, when people click on these they go to “Lead Pages” (some people call them Squeeze pages for real estate investing ).

Example #2: A Squeeze Page (or we call them “Landing Pages” ) for Real Estate Investing. A page like this is where you’d drive people to once they click on a link to download your free report. These pages are the real key… they need to be designed to convert well. Keep them simple, keep them short, and the only goal of the page is to get someone to put in their email address in exchange for this valuable information. From there, they’re in your email database so you can follow up with them again.

Example #3: Here’s an example on one of our AgentCarrot websites that drives people to opt-in to get a free home value report. Quick, simple… not a fancy design… but we’ve found designs like this tend to work very very well.

Example #4: This is a really cool strategy that has worked really really well for us on all of our sites in multiple industries… including real estate investing. At the bottom of every page on your website you should have some sort of a call to action. In this example, on the bottom of our “motivated seller sites”, this particular site focuses on “stop foreclosure”… we have a message offering our free report. This is VERY effective. Build out your own, or of course… we have these built right into our Carrot platform for our members.

What To Do Next To Get Leads Online For Your Real Estate Investing Business?

So, now that you’ve seen some examples and samples of how to effectively use free reports for your real estate investing business… what do you do next?

Here are some quick action steps for you:
1. Take some of our topics above or create your own free report topics… and create your first free report in the next 7 days (or hire someone from guru.com or textbroker.com for cheap). OR, join Carrot and get our “done for you” reports, websites, and Lead Pages to use to generate more leads online.
2. Get your website tweaked a bit to have 1 goal in mind, to generate leads… and close deals… that’s it. If a specific page on your site doesn’t actively drive people to take an action… add a free report link on it. Simple.
3. Start driving traffic to your site. We teach our Carrot members how to drive traffic to your site… you can have the best site in the world… but if no one gets to it and reads it… it doesn’t mean a thing. So, learn how to drive traffic and start to generate leads with your new free reports.
Have questions? Comments? Want to see inside our free reports that our members use? Just make a comment below and we’ll email you some sample pdfs that you can check out that have worked really well to generate cash buyer leads, motivated seller leads, and private lender leads.
November 21, 2012
REItheme – Here we are!
It’s been 2 years in the making… over 350 beta tester real estate investors later… and we’re officially releasing REItheme real estate investor websites to the whole world (at least… the whole real estate investor world ;-).

The Story

The story of how we came to be over the last 2 years is really pretty simple. We ourselves are real estate investors and own rental properties still today. In addition, we’ve worked with thousands of real estate investors around the country through our free tools and content at our sister site thereibrain.com. Through working with our subscribers and students there was one common need that they all voiced…

“I need a simple but effective website to use. Do you have a recommendation?”

We got that question over and over… so in 2010 we decided to create the first version of the REItheme sites just for those initial members. That group was our “beta” group which is over 350 members strong now. Giving us feedback, testing the sites, using them for their own real estate investing businesses… the whole shibang.

Then, finally… after enough procrastinating and delaying (because we’ve been so darn busy growing our other companies)… we decided to finish out REItheme so the entire real estate investor community can have access to the website system we’ve developed over the last 2 years.

Why We’re Different

The real estate investor website market has been a pretty stale market over the past 5 years. No real innovations, no one really deciding to take the leadership role in the market, and no one really focusing on what is best for the customer for running their real estate investor websites.

Above all… here are the main reasons why we’re excited about REItheme (and so are our customers):
- Customization: No two real estate investing businesses are the same, so why should you use the exact same website as 1,000+ other investors? That’s not the recipe for success in any business. You have to differentiate your company from the rest. With REItheme we’ve worked hard to make it so you can easily customize virtually every aspect of your website. From the branding, colors, and look/feel of your website… to the content… lead capture forms… properties… and more. You can put your own personal touch on your real estate investor website so it’s not like thousands of others… and you take control over every aspect of your website and no longer have to rely on a web guy or someone else to update your content for you.
- Stellar Member Experiences: Over the past several years our team has built multiple successful companies, combined reaching into the 7 figures… and a huge thing we’ve learned is that the better we’re able to create great customer experiences… the more our customers love us… and the more people flock to our services. So, we’re not just about amassing as many customers as we can… we’re about making using REItheme the best possible experience for you… from the signup to using your website day in and day out.
- Leveraging Social Media and the Search Engines: A HUGE drawback of most other real estate investor website templates on the market is that they look like they were built in 1987 and haven’t been built with the new technologies in mind. We’ve been able to generate over 30,000 real estate related leads directly from the search engines by ranking our pages and sites high for competitive search terms. Most website systems today in the real estate investor world never crack the top few pages of search results mainly because they weren’t built from the ground up with search engine optimization in mind. The same goes for social media. We want to make it easy for you to get the benefits of social media sites like Facebook… right from your own website.
- Credibility: Credibility is a big thing in any business… especially as a real estate investor. So, it’s very important what your website looks like and what it says when your prospects and clients find their way to your site. Our top notch design and copywriting team has put together great looking and professional websites that give a great first impression… and we’ve added in credibility elements that’ll help you relay the right message to people you want to work with. Easily add in testimonials, tell your story about your company on your about page, and more.
- Continual Improvements: We have a dedicated team focused on continually making REItheme the best website system for real estate investors today… and in the future. As new technologies come and go… we’ll continually update the system so you get those benefits without having to hire a web guy every time things change. Also, we’re continually testing our websites and finding new ways to make them rank higher in search engines, generate more leads, and be easier for you to use… and we always push those results down to your websites automatically. With REItheme you won’t have to worry about being left behind the technology curve… we’ll help you stay ahead of it.
The Future

We’ve got big plans for REItheme and the growth of this company and the growth of our customers businesses. We have no intentions of building REItheme into a “one stop shop” for real estate investor tools. There are already great systems out there that will calculate your offers on properties, manage your deals, run comps, and other great things.

That’s not our focus.

Our focus is to be the single best system for managing your web presence for your real estate investing business… with the features that help generate more traffic and leads as the main focus… and keeping the system simple and not packed with features 95% of investors don’t need.

Getting Started

So, if you’re a real estate investor and are looking for a better way to manage your online presence, generate leads, and regain control over your websites… check out REItheme to see if its a fit for you.

Also, if you know other investors who could use a website system like REItheme… check out our referral Partner program where you can earn 25% commissions on ever new REItheme member you refer (for the life of their account).

Enjoy and we look forward to working with you!

– Trevor and the REItheme Team
June 11, 2012