“If you had to give a ballpark guess, how much money would you say your Carrot site is worth to your business?” I asked.
I reached out to Ryan Dossey for an interview because first, he’s been a Carrot member since like 2014 (long enough that he can’t remember exactly when he signed up) and more importantly, because he’s a wildly successful entrepreneur and real estate investor.
He has been mentioned and/or quoted in Forbes, Time, Money, Entrepreneur, and Yahoo Finance.
In the last 18 months, his business, Christopher Ellyn Homes (which does a little of everything — wholesaling, flipping, and buy-and-hold) acquired $8.8 million in rentals.
In terms of cash flow, his real estate investing business typically generates somewhere in the high five-figure range every month (they’ve hit 7 figures a few times).
He’s also the founder of Call Porter and Ballpoint Marketing.
“Oh man. It’s hard to place a number on that. But I’d say that our Carrot site is easily worth 7 figures to our business,”
Ryan responded…
“I mean, we’ve done 7 figures in assignments through that site. If it wasn’t for my Carrot site, I wouldn’t have the same credibility I have today in my market.”
Talk about some awesome feedback!
He also offered some tips for real estate investors who are looking to grow their businesses and cut through the clutter.
5 Ways Ryan Dossey Generates Consistent 7 Figures
#1: You Gotta Get a Carrot Site
Back in 2012, Ryan was just getting into real estate investing. And the first site he created for his business was hosted on Lead Propeller — one of our competitors that many of you are probably aware of.
But eventually, Ryan got fed-up with painfully low conversion rates and moved to Carrot.
More specifically, his Lead Propeller site was suffering to the tune of a 1% or 2% conversion rate. His Carrot site now receives about an 11% conversion rate.
He gets far more leads. And because of that, he’s able to build a sustainable business with predictable lead-flow and income.
Even when sending direct mail, Ryan says,
“It’s my website that build credibility when people are trying to learn about my business. If I didn’t have a trustworthy site that loads fast and looks like a million bucks and converts well, then my business wouldn’t be as profitable as it is today — plain and simple.”
Which begs the question: is your site doing all of those things? If it isn’t, then you might consider getting yourself a Carrot site. Our sites load even faster than Google and we’re constantly optimizing tech stack, SEO, and design. To quote Ryan once more,
“My favorite thing about Carrot is that they’re constantly optimizing so you don’t have to.”
#2: Customize Your Carrot Site
Having been a Carrot member for 4 or 5 years, I thought Ryan would be the perfect guy to give advice to new Carrot members about how to get the most of their membership.
So I asked him,
“What would you tell new Carrot members to do with their site to get the most bang for their buck?”
His response was simple:
“Customize it. You have to make it your own. You have to create a brand image for your business.”
Specifically referring to his own Carrot site, he said,
“We customized the hero image on the homepage, we rewrote and customized the entire ‘Our Company’ page, and we replaced all of the stock images with real images of our city or the people who work in our business.”
And he recommends that all Carrot members do the same thing.
“Carrot provides a great foundation, but you have to customize your site if you really want to stand out from the competition.”
Ryan and his team even went so far as to create separate landing pages for different markets where they operate (something we highly recommend doing — you can learn more about optimizing your city pages).
Originally, Ryan did all of these customizations himself to save on money. But recently, he decided to sign up for Carrot’s Concierge service, where we make all of these site changes for you, specific to your industry and business.
Of our Concierge service, Ryan commented,
“We noticed some pretty solid changes. Actually, our bounce rate went down and our sessions duration went up after going through Carrot’s Concierge service.”
I asked him for specifics and he said that his bounce rate went from 70% before the Concierge service to 65% and his average session duration went from 2:18 to 3:18.
Pretty cool, huh?
Related Content: Here are 13 Changes You Can Make to Differentiate Your Carrot site in Under 10 Minutes
#3: Publish Regular Blog SEO Content
At Carrot, we talk a lot about the power of maintaining a blog on your real estate site. It helps make your site appear more active to visitors and it gives your website more opportunities to rank in Google (which means more chances to generate free traffic and leads).
And we’re so adamant about the importance of having a blog on your site that our Content Pro and Advanced Marketer plans include monthly content.
That’s right — every month we’ll send you content for your blog so you don’t have to spend hours writing and researching your own content. The Content Pro plan includes 12 articles every month and the Advanced Marketer plan includes the same 12 plus 12 more exclusive articles.
From our experience, more content equals more leads.
And when I asked Ryan what his favorite thing about Carrot is, he said,
“I love the blog content that Carrot provides.”
When I asked him why he loves it, he said,
“Well, first, because it fills out our site and makes us appear more active. But also because those articles are actually generating leads for our business every month.”
And while we recommend customizing about 25% of the articles that we give our members to avoid duplicate content, Ryan and his team just post those articles on their website without any changes.
And still, those articles are generating about 10% of all of their website’s traffic every single month purely through SEO.
Sure — you could publish your own blog content. But you have enough other work to do — you don’t need to add consistent content marketing to your plate.
Why not let us write the blog articles for you?
Plus, if you really want to create some of your own content on top of what we provide you with, then we’ve made it dead-simple and lightning-fast through a little tool we call VideoPost.
Related Content: On-Page SEO for Real Estate: 16 Steps to Optimize Your Websites
#4: Target Competitor’s Keywords
One day, Ryan was doing some SEO research for his real estate website. He typed “Christopher Ellyn Homes” — the name of his company — into Google to make sure that they were ranking first for branded search terms…
…but wait — what’s this?
Looking at the Google Ads, he noticed that some of his competitors were spending money to target his branded keyword phrases.
After doing some research on the ad strategy, he decided to do something similar. Now he targets some of his biggest market competitor’s branded keywords with his own Google ads.
What’s more? He’s even generating a few leads every month with this strategy! And the even cooler part he mentioned is that the cost-per-lead with this strategy is dirt cheap — specifically, $15.
So why not give it a try yourself? It’s worth a shot, especially if your competitors are already trying to steal your own leads. ;-)
Related Content: Learn How To Find High-Intent Real Estate Keywords and Dominate Your Market’s SEO Rankings
#5: He Doesn’t Use Yellow Letters & Postcards – Instead, Goes Color
Yellow letters are extremely common among real estate investors.
And the reason is simple: they get opened. After all, if you received a yellow letter in your mailbox, you’re going to open it simply to see if it’s as important as it claims to be.
There are a few problems with sending yellow letters, though. First, it’s very competitive — so if you do it, too, you’re just joining in with that clutter. As Earl Nightingale once said…
“Look at what the majority of people are doing, and do the exact opposite, and you’ll probably never go wrong for as long as you live.”
Second, a yellow letter can be portrayed as dishonest. The implication of a yellow letter is that it’s some sort of legal warning. But, of course, that isn’t true. So when someone opens up your letter, there’s a serious chance of frustration because they feel deceived.
Ryan Dossey makes a strong case against yellow letters and postcards, saying, “They are just the same old thing. If you want to get a higher response rate, you have to do something different. You have to stand out.”
Instead, Ryan uses full-color, custom branded pieces. And he says that he gets a higher response rate from his direct mail than anyone else in his market. “It’s a huge advantage,” he says.
So consider ditching the yellow letters and postcards and trying something else — something that none of your competitors are doing.
Conclusion
At Carrot, we take our member’s success very seriously. If our members succeed at building businesses that provide them with financial and personal freedom, then we count that as a win.
In fact, our mission at Carrot is to “Add humanity back to business and give people more time in life for the things that matter.”
If you feel like you’re on the hamster wheel with your business, constantly grinding away but never see real promising results, never building tangible momentum that can carry your business forward for years to come, then we might be the solution you’re looking for.
We’ve generated millions of leads for thousands of real estate professionals around the country, and we’d love to do the same for you. Give us a risk-free try over here and let’s build the business of your dreams together. :-)