Shemeika Fox is a real estate agent in Santa Cruz. She’s marketing her business in ways that most real estate agents never even consider, and because of that, she’s cutting through the clutter in her competitive market. Since implementing Carrot and an Inbound methodology, Shemeika’s web page views increased by 227% and their closings have increased 2x.
Recently, she joined us on the CarrotCast to discuss her journey through our 30 Day Challenge, which has helped her take her market authority even further. She is quickly ramping herself up to be the leading real estate expert in all of Santa Cruz!
In 2019, Shemeika Fox doubled her number of closings. But it wasn’t by sheer luck… it was by clear-cut strategy and intentional action.
She’s marketing her business in ways that most real estate agents never even consider, and because of that, she’s cutting through the clutter in her competitive market.
Just before that success, though, Shemeika was tired and frustrated — she was on the hamster wheel of business, sweating for every single lead.
She knew something needed to change.
And that’s when she made these five key shifts in her thinking and her marketing.
1. Mindset Shift: From Hunting To Farming
Entrepreneurs are great at getting up early and working late.
There’s a ceasless motivation that drives entrepreneurs, and while that’s an important quality for success, it’s also not sustainable.
Ask any ex-entrepreneur why they got a day-job and they’ll probably tell you that they worked too hard and too long for too little payback.
That’s because most entrepreneurs hunt for their closings.
They pay for advertisements, ask for referrals, send direct mail, follow-up, and cold call. But here’s the thing: the moment that you stop doing those things… the leads stop flowing. Which means that the only way to generate more leads or to keep generating leads at all it to keep working harder and longer… to keep hunting.
But what about a farmer?
A farmer is different than a hunter. They plant seeds, nurture those seeds, and then reap the benefits of their careful attention.
All of the lines on the left are equal to the length of the line on the right, but more progress is made when focus is put in just one mission-critical direction.
Sure, it takes more time to see the results, but the harvest is much more plentiful and, in terms of ROI, it requires much less work per closing.
Now we’re not saying that you should stop running ads or sending direct mail, but you should be farming and hunting for your leads.
Hunt for leads when your business needs them immediately, and farm when you can allow a bit more time for results.
This was an important mindset shift for Shemieka to make and it’s important for all entrepreneurs.
Harder work is not the only way to generate more leads or grow a bigger business. Like the cliche goes, work smarter, not harder.
For Shemieka, that means consistently running ads and sending direct mail, but also spending plenty of time building her online brand image, posting content to social media, and growing her SEO presence.
2. Simple, Effective Lead-Generation Website
Building an effective website is one of the most difficult parts about building a real estate business.
You need one because everyone else has one… but how do you get that website to actually be useful and generate leads?
And in order to get the functionalities and features you need to get your website generating leads on autopilot, how do you build that without spending thousands of dollars on a custom design?
For Shemeika (and for more than 7,000 real estate pros around the nation), Carrot was the answer.
Before signing up with Carrot, this was Shemeika’s website.
It might look pretty, but the problem is that it wasn’t generating leads for Shmeika’s business, no matter how much traffic she drove to the site.
That’s why she signed up with Carrot.
Here’s her new website.
And guess what?
People don’t just visit that site… they opt-in, they contact her, and those leads turn into closings.
In fact, her website brings in so many leads that, in 2019, she doubled her number of closings.
Why?
Well, the genius of our Carrot methodology is in giving your website traffic exactly what they want. First, people tell you whether they want to buy a home or sell their home.
If they want to buy, then they can immediately start browsing through your listings — if they find something they like, they just have to dial the number in the upper right corner of your Carrot site!
If they want to sell their home, then they’ll be taken to this page which is designed to get them in contact with you as soon as possible.
And the conversion rate on Carrot sites is higher than any other website builder in the industry, which means more leads, more often.
This was a fundamental shift for Shameika. In her own words,
“Carrot has impacted my business so positively! I love the property websites, landing pages, the SEO rankings, blog and over all design of the site. I also love the landing pages that i use to drive traffic from ads that I run. And my favorite is to watch the increase on Google rankings with the more relevant content we produce. Really great web host!”
3. Focus On Blog & SEO
One thing we’ve found that separates top-performing real estate agents from everyone else is a focus on search engine optimization.
And that makes sense.
Because if you rank on page one for a search phrase that is getting attention every single month, then you’re going to get a lot more website traffic and lot more leads than your competitors.
And by focussing on SEO, you won’t just get more leads, you’ll also get higher quality leads.
Our members have found SEO leads to be about three times higher quality than leads from paid advertisements, which means it takes about three times less leads to actually close.
The reason for that is simple.
With paid advertisements, you’re interrupting people who may or may not be intersted in your service.
But with SEO, interested people come searching for you.
So the question becomes, how can you build your SEO rankings?
Well, we’ve designed Carrot to help you do just that… and here are some of the features we offer that you’ll definitely want to take advantage of…
Ranking Tracker — Our ranking tracker will keep an eye on how your website is performing for certain keywords in Google. Just enter the keywords that you’re trying to rank for and our ranking tracker will do the rest, giving your regular updates on your website’s SEO performance.
SEO Tool — Whenever you’re designing a page of your website with Carrot, just scroll to the bottom to find our SEO Tool, which will automatically scan your page for search engine optimizations and give you a checklist of what you still need to do. Once the light is green, that means you’re good to go!
Monthly Blog Posts — If you sign up for a Content Pro or Advanced Marketer membership, then we’ll also provide you with blog content for your website every month that is customized for your market and written to rank for a specific high-value keyword in Google. Just publish the content every month and you’ll give your website a better chance of ranking!
VideoPost — One of Shemeika’s favorite things about her Carrot site is the ability to use a feature that we call VideoPost. This tool allows you to upload and trascribe any video into a long-form blog post for your website that can help you rank in Google. But instead of writing the article, you just upload your video and we’ll do the rest. This is a great way to quickly and easily create SEO content for your website.
4. Advertisements & Landing Pages
When we asked Shameika what her favorite thing about Carrot was, she mentioned that she loves being able to quickly and easily create landing pages that she can then drive paid traffic to.
With Carrot, you can create a new landing page with just a few clicks.
You can then customize that page however you want.
You can turn it into a sales page with an opt-in form, testimonials, and even a credibility bar… or you can turn it into a long-form blog post.
The choice is yours.
But one of the best ways to make use of this feature is to create a new landing page for each specific market that you’re advertising to… and then to drive that traffic to that page.
You might, for example, create a page for people who want to buy river-front homes, or a page for people who want to sell a home for over $500,000, or people who just want to learn more about you as a real estate agent.
Remember, the riches are in the niches.
And with a Carrot site, you can easily create a sales page for each niche that you operate in.
Here’s a Facebook ad that Shameika is currently running…
And here is the page that advertisement will take you to if you click.
See how the advertisement seamlessly flows into the landing page?
That’s how it should always be.
It should feel like one cohesive experience rather than two separate experiences.
And by leveraging the versatility of Facebook’s targeting and Carrot’s landing page builder, you can create a seamless experience for buyers and sellers in any niche or market.
Here’s one more example…
And here’s the landing page…
Shameika skillfully attracts her target market with Facebook ads and then gives them what they want most on the landing page.
In return, she gets their contact information and can then add them to her email list.
Or maybe she’ll be able to start working with them right away. Whatever happens, this is a great strategy for generating leads.
Create more landing pages for more niches and markets… and use advertisements to drive targeted traffic.
5. The 30-Day Challenge
What if you could take a system that’s proven to generate high-quality leads — a system that has made hundreds of investors and agents around the nation millions of dollars — and implement it right into your business in just 30-60 minutes per day over a 30-day period?
Sounds too good to be true, yeah?
Well, that’s the exact system that Shameika went through… and it helped to unlock her business’ full potential.
In it, we walk you through how to brand your real estate business, how to drive traffic, and — most importantly — how to get high-quality leads (and even how to obliterate your best month’s lead-gen record)
At Carrot, we’ve helped countless real estate pros beat their most aggressive market competitors, generate more than one million leads, and build businesses that support themselves and their families.
Over the last few years, we’ve learned a lot about what real estate marketing tactics work… and what doesn’t.
And we thought to ourselves…
“What if we created a tried-and-true, fool-proof lead-gen system for agents and investors — a system that would help our members become the go-to experts in their market, drive leads passively to their website, and build the business of their entrepreneurial dreams?”
This challenge is helping people even more than we could have imagined…
One of our long-standing members, Chris Wojciechowski, said he wishes we would have created this challenge 3 years ago!
So…
Are you ready to create a marketing system for your real estate business that generates leads like clockwork, that makes your business more predictable and sustainable?
Moreover, are you ready to spend just 30-60 minutes per day over the next month to make it happen?
Great!
Conclusion
What are your goals for 2020?
Do you want to generate more leads, do more closings, and grow your revenue?
Do you maybe even want to double the number of closings you do this year?
Well, we can no longer count on one hand the number of Carrot members who have taken their businesses to the next level.
There are many stories just like Shameika’s of agents and investors who have used online marketing, SEO, Carrot, and advertising to beat their competition and build the business of their entrepreneurial dreams.
Hey, this is JT with Silver Street Marketing and I have a Facebook real estate video ads training for you guys.
This first little part, I am going to show is how to log into your Ads Manager. If you’ve ever boosted a post, ever done any sort of paid advertising on Facebook, it will be quite easy. And if you haven’t, you’ll be able to figure it out as well!
The MAIN reason we’re doing this training is that there is such a high increase in reach volume right now that you need to be using video ads within a views campaign to maximize your accounts.
Take Advantage of the Opportunity Facebook Ads Offers for Real Estate
There is a huge opportunity to build up your audiences so that you can see big results heading into the end of quarter two and start of quarter three on your retargeting, as well as just getting a front of people right now, preparing lists for cold calling or direct mail, and finding new prospective sellers.
There’s a lot of people out there right now that are on Facebook that could use your help.
Let’s dive in!
Follow These Steps to Create Facebook Real Estate Video Ads Using Video Views
First, we’ll show you how to log into your ad account.
From your Facebook page, drop down the menu and click “Manage Ads“
If you’ve never opened up a Facebook Ads Manager before you can just click the account right here under “Business Manager” and you’ll get to the same page.
I’m going to pull up my Ads Manager and get started creating ads.
If you have boosted a post in the past, it will be right here…
Facebook automatically creates this for you. If you’ve never done it, it’ll walk you through the steps of creating your Ads Manager so you can start doing some posts and different advertising on Facebook.
Starting Your Video Views Campaign
So the campaigns that I’ve been seeing lots of results in, are video views campaigns.
Start by typing in video views for the “Campaign Name” and you’ll have to make sure the “Special Ad Category” is selected for “Housing“.
Facebook has stopped allowing people who are running any ads that relate to real estate to be outside of this category. So it’s best that you go ahead and do this to avoid any issues.
If you’re going to build multiple ads, or ad sets inside this targeting multiple audiences, I would suggest using your campaign budget optimization.
Basically what this does is it allows Facebook to help you find the best budget to spend on each ad set. It also allocates the most towards the one that’s performing best. But for right now we’re just going to build one ad set, and one ad, to get us going.
For this example, I’m going to type in “Video Views Example” for the “Ad Set Name“.
Then, for this example, we’ll name our ad Ad1.
We’re using the quick creation. I use the most because it’s a little bit faster, but you can also go to the guided creation. If you’re in the guided creation, there’ll be an option to switch to the quick creation.
To finalize this part, click “Save Draft“.
Now, go ahead and change the traffic over to a video views campaign and click continue.
We’re going for video views and the reason why this is that you can opt-in for an option to only pay when someone watches a video of 10 to 15 seconds.
Generally, Facebook charges you per impression. So you would just have a standard amount that you get charged the more people that you’re in front of. Using this method you can actually show ads to an audience that is interested because they’re watching for a longer extended period of time.
Next, we want to go into the ad set level, where we’re going to be able to make these changes.
You can use a budget as low as $2 to $3 a day and really see a lot of traffic. We’re talking 3,000 to 4,000 people watching at least 15 seconds of your video a month, easily off of $2 a day.
For this example, we’re going to put it at $5 to be a little bit more aggressive on this one and have it starting today.
Now, let’s select an audience. If you have never created an audience before, what you’re going to do is select your Ads Manager and click “Audiences“. You’ll be taken to a page that is going to be full of the audiences that you can create.
We’re going to show you how to upload a list today. And we’re going to create a special look-alike off of that list.
To save a little time, I’ve already created some special look-alike audiences. If you’ve done Facebook advertising before, but you weren’t doing special look-alike audiences, you will have to recreate your look-alikes.
But first, we’re going to show you how to upload a list. I use this to prepare for cold calling or direct mail lists that are going out because the video views campaign has a high amount of reach.
You can get in front of a lot of these people before you hop on the phone or send them a mailer, or even after, and get them to understand you more and get a little bit of that celebrity effect going.
Overall, building yourself into an authority in your space by showing people your brand and your identity and what you do, before they have an interaction with you. It helps to prepare and educate them.
Go into the custom audience,press “Customer List“, and next. Choose no customer value and go ahead and upload your list.
Next, select the columns to be uploaded.
For Facebook you need to have a minimum of:
First name
Last name
City
State
Zip code
But I would definitely suggest if you have a phone numberand email addresses to upload because you’ll have a higher match rate.
How to Create a Look-alike Audience from Your List
Once the list is uploaded select that custom list. Now, to create a look-alike audience off this list, you would select create new, and you go to special ad audience.
The reason why you would do this is that you don’t have a large number of names on that list, or you’re looking for more people who are similar to those people on the list. What Facebook will do will analyze those people and what their interests are that are on the list, and find everyone who’s similar in your area.
So you can go ahead and select your list. For my example, I’ll use Facebook NOD. Type in the United States.
Then I suggest using either 1% or 3% look-alike. The 1% is going to be a little bit more narrow. But after talking to many Facebook reps, 3% has been performing really well.
It won’t hurt you to begin with the 3% look-alike on a video views campaign. But, if you’d like to be more targeted, go with 1%. If you’re seeing a low audience size after doing this with a 1%, then simply adjust a new audience to 3%.
You can run these audiences together, but I would suggest creating a new campaign for any lists that you’ve uploaded and run them separately. Because this audience is going to have a lot more people than what is going to be on that list.
Facebook required a 15-mile radius. You can also drop pinpoints or look up county names and drop pinpoints around those.
Next select “Manual Placements“…
I don’t want to advertise on the audience network, which is basically a lot of apps and websites. That is good for retargeting, but what it’s not good for is building audiences because Facebook can’t track how many people actually watched the video over in the audience network.
Also, remove “Messenger“, because Facebook and Instagram are really what generate the most video views.
Depending on the length of your videos, consider removing Instagram as well. If you have content that’s more geared towards Facebook, so the ratios are different and the time length is over two minutes long, then you would want to unselect Instagram, or you can create a custom ad for just Instagram.
For our example, I’m just going to leave Facebook and Instagram on.
*Note* If it’s your first time running ads, Facebook will not let you select ThruPlay, but you can come back in two weeks and change this. ThruPlay means that you’re only charged when somebody watches at least 10 to 15 seconds for our video or completes it if your video is shorter.
Creating Your Facebook Video Ad
We’re going to add a video. You can either upload one or use one that you’ve had up in the past. For this example, I’m going to use an old customer testimonial video.
Once it’s uploaded, you can go and type in your copy. I would suggest going deeper into what you really provide for people to make the ad interesting for them.
For this ad, I’m going to use some copy to kind of fill the gaps. Such as…
“Sell your house for cash “As-Is” within seven days without paying for any repairs, fees, or commissions. We are a good fit for those behind on payments, taxes, have to sell quickly, or have a tenant they don’t want to deal with.“
“We buy homes with cash. To get your cash offer, click learn more, and fill out a small form on our website. We will reach out to you within 24 hours with a fair cash offer.“
I also like to put a website URL, because this is going to increase the likelihood that someone’s going to go to your website. It also helps with the organic side as well.
For the headline, we’re going to use, “Sell Your House Fast“. Using the description area if optional. Or you can go extra long on your headline so it fills up both rows, either way, works.
Add your website to the “Website URL” section and I would suggest building a website URL parameter for better tracking. You can use a tool such as Google’s Campaign URL Builder or use Carrot’s custom campaign tracking link tool.
Next, add the display link. This isn’t required, but we like to make sure the display URL looks a little nicer.
Then we’re going to turn on the Facebook pixel. That should be connected to your website, and you’ll be ready to publish.
Now, you want to come back to this audience page.
The reason is we want to collect the audiences that you’re building with this campaign.
Go into custom audience and go to video. Select video and you’ll want to select how much motivation or how long people engage with our content.
The one I’m going to select is a 50% video view. That means anyone who watched, for example, 30 seconds of a minute-long video, is pretty motivated. These are the ones that you want to retarget and track and keep ads in front of them to make sure to stay top of mind with them.
Go to our page…
And you’ll find your video on your page, and you’ll just select it. And so we have this testimonial video we’ll select that one and we’ll just hit confirm.
What that will do is make it capable of tracking and building a whole separate campaign, over using a conversions campaign, a traffic campaign, or a reach campaign.
Youll be able to drive people to your website, or just staying in front of people who seem most motivated, and retargeting them later.
All right. That is it for today’s training. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments section and we’ll be able to help you out with that. Good luck!
It’s hard building a thriving and successful real estate agent business.
But, of course, there are some things that will make it a little easier.
You’ve got tons of competition (other real estate agents) to deal with. You have to make good hires as your business expands, utilize the right tools, and budget your finances effectively.
You’ve also got to consistently generates leads and make transactions.
That’s the real crux of the issue, isn’t it?
Because if you’re not consistently making transactions, then your business isn’t going to grow. If you are, on the other hand, then everything else will sort of fall into place.
So we put together this article to give you some additional ideas for generating leads for your business, in good times and bad.
Here’s the hard truth about most website builders: they are great for… well, building a website… but they aren’t great for getting conversions necessarily.
Most website builders (like WordPress and Wix, for instance) provide you with a suite of tools to create any kind of website that you like, but they don’t provide you with guidance as to what will actually work best in your industry.
Because when someone visits your website, they are considering working with you. And it’s your job to build trust and get their contact information as quickly as possible.
At Carrot, we’ve run hundreds of split tests to determine what type of website converts the most visitors. And the best part is, all of our AgentCarrot Members get a high-converting website out of the box — just customize the copy, images, and logos however you like and you’ve got yourself an online lead generation machine for real estate agents.
2. Get Rankings For Long-Tail Keywords
At Carrot, we spend a lot of time discussing SEO and Google rankings… that’s because we know the power of Google rankings first hand for our business and we’ve seen the impact on our member’s businesses.
If you rank on page 1 for high-value keyword phrases in your market, then most of your business’ lead gen will take care of itself.
Sure — you’ll still want to run paid ads and network within your community, but ranking in Google will give you an undeniable step up on the competition.
Here’s what we’re talking about…
When someone searches for a pertinent phrase specific to your market — “Best real estate agent in [MARKETY CITY]” or “[MARKET CITY] real estate agent”, for example — if you’re on the first page, then you have a fair chance of that person visiting your website and becoming a lead.
The higher up you are on the first page, the better your chances.
But how do you get your website to the top of the rankings?
First, you have to choose a keyword phrase with the right intent and with not too much competition.
Here are a few examples of great starter keywords for most markets…
Best real estate agents in [MARKETY CITY]
Real estate agent in [MARKET CITY]
Buy a home in [MARKETY CITY]
Sell my home in [MARKETY CITY]
If you want to get ranking even faster, then you might target longer-tail keyword phrases based on your niche or preferred market…
Sell my riverside home in [MARKET CITY]
Get best price on my home in [MARKETY CITY]
Want to downsize in [MARKETY CITY]
The list could go on… but you get the idea.
The next step is to create a page on your website that’s dedicated specifically to the keyword phrase that you’ve chosen.
This means that the exact phrase you chose should be in the title, meta description, and URL of your page — this will give you a better chance of ranking.
Then watch what your rankings do (you can use our Keyword Ranking Tracker if you’re a Carrot member) and adapt your strategy as needed.
If you aren’t ranking as you expected, then look at what other page-1 results are doing and try to mimic their strategy (without stealing). If you get to the first page seamlessly, then move onto other keywords and keep the momentum going!
Do this with enough keywords and, over time, your website will start pulling in traffic and leads… passively.
3. Use Incentivized Opt-In Forms
One of the most common mistakes that real estate agents make when designing their website is that they don’t have an incentivized opt-in form at the front and center of their primary pages (homepage, about page, listing pages, etc).
If you’re going to collect leads through your website, then you need an incentivized opt-in form.
What is an incentivized opt-in form?
Well first, it’s a form that’s easy for your target market to fill out. Usually, it just requires name and contact information (the fewer fields you require, the higher your conversion rate will be, usually).
The second piece is just as important, though: this form is incentivized, which means that when someone fills it out, you give them exactly what they want.
The G Team, for example, a real estate company in Roseburg Oregon, has an incentivized opt-in form on all of their property listing pages.
You could also put an opt-in form on your homepage that requires visitors to give you their email address before viewing your listings.
There are a lot of different options here, but the important thing is to make sure that your website is set up to collect leads.
Oh — and all Carrot websites come with an incentivized opt-in form baked right in. ;)
4. Ask For Referrals
Creating a consistent referral process with your past clients can be a great way to generate more leads and grow your business.
You might be surprised by how many people are willing to offer referrals once you’ve helped them and built a relationship with them.
And the best part is, leads that are referred to you have a super high close-rate of 70%.
So why not call some of your past clients, catch up, and ask them if they know anyone who might require your services?
Most people won’t mind you asking and many people will probably give you a referral if they know of someone who’s trying to buy or sell their home.
Worth a shot!
5. Master Content Marketing
Content marketing is an extremely powerful tool for real estate agents. Unfortunately, though, not many real estate agents consistently use content in their marketing strategy.
But that’s good news for you… if your competitors aren’t content marketing, then that’s a gap you might be able to fill!
Okay… but what is content marketing?
Well, it’s basically just creating content (video, podcast, social media posts, blog posts, etc) that attract your target market… usually by providing free value.
And this is what one of member’s blogs looks like just from the content they’ve received through their Carrot plan.
The coolest part, though, is that those blog posts can generate leads for your business!
You can share them on social media to attract attention and they can even rank in Google for certain phrases and pull traffic passively.
The other option is to create your own blog content. And while that can be time-consuming, at Carrot, we’ve also created a simple solution for that.
With VideoPost, you can transcribe a video you’ve recorded into a long-form blog post with the click of a button!
Here is a PERFECT example of the power of content marketing + VideoPosts.
“In this post, we’ll walk through real case studies that show you how to beat Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com in Google in your local market and scoop up traffic and leads for FREE away from the tech giants.”
Or you could send flyers that provide people with a look into your market’s current housing conditions.
Clearly, you have a lot of options when it comes to your direct mail campaigns. And what you send will depend largely on how creative you’re willing to get.
At the very least, we would recommend sending holiday postcards.
But a really successful direct mail strategy will depend on consistently sending mailers to connect with your community and generate leads.
7. Sponsor Housewarming Parties 🎈
One overlooked way to impress your clients, build brand awareness, and even generate leads is to sponsor a housewarming party for your clients who just purchased a new home.
Obviously you don’t want to make it too much about you, but just hosting the party will speak volumes about you and your business to the people who attend.
Plus, you can meet lots of new people in the community that you’ve never met before and maybe even get a referral or two out of it.
Just ask the new homeowners to invite anyone they like and tell them that you’ll be handling the refreshments.
At the very least, you’re going to surprise and delight your existing clients!
8. Brand Your Clothing
It might seem silly, but branding your clothing can be a great way to build awareness for your business and get people asking questions.
Heck, we even do this at Carrot with the dolls that we create for our members!
Why?
Well, partly because it’s fun. ;)
But also because we know that when someone asks one of our members why they have a Carrot doll, that’s going to launch into a discussion about the service that we offer.
You can use the same tactic by either branding your own clothing with your business name and logo and/or giving a free t-shirt or hat to people who’ve worked with you in the past.
There are lots of different websites that allow you to create custom clothing. Printful is one of the most well-known.
9. Partner With Other Experts
Let’s think for a minute.
Who else probably talks with a lot of people who are wanting to buy or sell their home?
Appraisers? Local handymen? Coffee shop workers? Real estate investors?
Anyone else you can think of?
If you could build a relationship with those people and create a two-way lead-gen street (you give them referrals and they give you referrals), that can be a really beneficial thing for your business.
So make a list of everyone you can think of who is already speaking with your target market, give ’em a call, and tell ’em what you have in mind.
You might be surprised by how many people are willing to help you out.
10. Attend Networking Events
Most communities have recurring meetups or networking events for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
These can be a great place to build relationships with other entrepreneurs in your community and create mutually beneficial partnerships.
(If there isn’t one in your community, then you might consider starting one!)
Meeting the right person to aid you with your next phase of business can really help to unlock its potential.
You never know who you’re going to meet, what opportunities will be placed on your lap, or what you’ll learn all because you attended a certain meet-up.
Plus, marketers and salespeople who spend time on social selling (building important relationships) tend to be more successful than their counterparts.
At Carrot, we talk a lot about organic marketing strategies like SEO and content marketing.
And those are super important for growing your business over the long-term!
But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the power of paid advertising.
In fact, most of our members consistently use paid ads to generate leads for their businesses and they build up organic strategies over time to decrease overhead.
The best part about paid ads is that they generate leads right now… not later.
But the question is… how much money should you spend on your paid advertisements and how can you make sure that you’re going to collect a healthy ROI?
Well, we created this totally free ROI calculator so that you can enter your know-able metrics and determine your budget.
We originally created this calculator for investors but it works just as well for agents.
For example, if you typically profit $5,000 per transaction, close one transaction for every 5 leads, average $4 per click, and have a website conversion rate of 6%… then you should be willing to pay a minimum of $333 to get one deal and a maximum of $433.
This part of marketing is mostly science. Just update your ads regularly, make sure you’re targeting the right audiences, set your budget, and keep to the process.
The more consistent you are with running paid ads, the faster and more predictably your business will grow.
12. Advertise At Local Businesses
We’ve talked a lot about collaborating with other business owners in your community.
And that’s because, for real estate agents, that’s a really powerful strategy.
But if you want to skip the relationship-building and networking piece, you might just consider asking some local businesses if you can advertise with them.
You could pay for a spot on the local radio. You could put up flyers at local coffee shops. You could provide free mints at restaurants with a sign that says “Courtesy of [BUSINESS NAME].”
Your imagination and creativity is the limit.
The more people who see your face in the community, the more leads you’re going to naturally generate.
Ready To Get More Leads & Close Your Next Listing? Join the Agent 30-Day Challenge
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That’s a great question and there can be a couple of answers.
Adopting the Right Mindset for Your Google Ads for Real Estate Account
Before we dive into calculations, we need to cover the mindset approach you’ll need to have before starting a Google Ads account.
Understand You’ll Need Time for Testing
It is important to realize going into an ad campaign that you’ll need to do so with a realistic time frame in mind. The time frame will depend on your budget and it also depends on your market.
There might not be enough search volume for your target keywords to get leads data in one or two months. For example, “sell my house fast” might be searched for 30 times per month in your market and you would get 4 clicks from that particular keyword.
Is it realistic that you would get a lead from only 4 clicks? Probably not. Of course, though, you’ll be targeting more than just one keyword.
The goal is to make sure there is enough search volume for your target keywords to achieve your goals within your time frame.
Mistake #1:Don’t Stop Too Soon
Stopping too soon is one of the biggest mistakes we see, not just for real estate investors or agents, but in business in general.
Too many of us stop way before we actually should stop. We invest a little bit of money in this marketing type and it doesn’t pan out right away and we go…
“Oh my gosh, that must not work.”
We throw up our arms and then we start something else and then we do that for a little bit. Then that doesn’t work like we thought it would, and we throw up our arms again…
If you create a pattern of going and investing a little bit, dabbling, and then pulling back because you didn’t get the results you wanted, you’re probably going to be in that pattern forever until you change your thought process.
If you fall into that pattern you’re going to be looking back in a year or two and going…
“Oh my gosh, I ended up investing a lot of money, I lost a lot of money, I didn’t grow the business that I wanted to, and I don’t have the freedom that I wanted and thought that I would have in my business.”
You’re going to blame it on everything but your marketing mindset. Having the right marketing mindset can save you from that.
Give yourself enough time. For Google Ads, that’s typically gathering three months of solid data before taking a hard look at if it’s working for your budget and market.
Google Ads Budget – How Much Should You Spend?
If you’re just starting out, it’s smart to start with a test budget. You’ll want to hold your costs while you’re figuring out what is going to work.
While you’re in data-gathering mode. It’s possible that your initial campaign will be profitable, but you may break-even, or you may lose a little money.
We’ve created many campaigns that were profitable right out of the gate, but you shouldn’t put all of your chips in and expect this to happen. Instead, it’s helpful to shift your mindset to looking at the first month or so as investing in market research.
With your initial campaign, you’ll:
Gain insights into what ad messages are resonating with your target market.
Learn what keywords are converting into qualified leads and customers.
And, you’ll be able to test your landing pages to figure out what is working best for converting clicks into leads and customers.
Before you get started, learn how you can get “cost per click” estimates before going live with an account using the Google Keyword Planner tool...
What should your budget be? Here are a couple of ways to formulate your budget
First, you can calculate an estimated budget by multiplying the number of keywords you want to test by the cost per click and by a minimum of 100-200 clicks. As a general rule, you’ll want to get at least 100-200 clicks to determine what is converting for you.
For example, if you’re going to test 10 keywords with a cost per click of $10, we’ll need to plan on a test budget of $1,000 to $2,000. You’ll find that there will be a mix of winning and losing keywords, ads, and possibly landing pages from the start.
As you see the data come in, you’ll “prune” your campaign by keeping the winning keywords, dropping the losers to bring your campaign to profitability, and ready for the next round of expansion and testing.
Thesecond calculation is how we typically estimate a monthly budget. Start by looking at how many clicks it’s going to take to get a lead. As a general rule, it takes 15-20 clicks to get a lead. Let’s say your cost per click averages $20 per click. Next, let’s say it takes 5 leads to turn into a deal.
15 clicks to get a lead
$20 per click
5 leads to get a deal
The equation looks like this:
Clicks x Cost Per Click x Number of Leads to Get a Deal
15 x $20 = $300 x 5 = $1500. You’ll need to budget $1500 to get one deal.
We have a client who spends more than $10,000 per month with Google Ads. He’s happy to do so because he earns healthy profits on that advertising.
The million dollar question is…
“How do I get to that point where I’m scaling up my Google Ads and capturing more of my market share?”
That is how you scale up your Google Ads. Know your numbers and remove emotion from it.
Find your average profit per deal first.
Find out how many leads it takes you to close a deal.
Figure out your conversion rate on your website.
Figure out how much it’s going to cost you to get those visitors to your site from Google Ads.
Conclusion
You can’t fully explore Google Ads for real estate without money. And, making room in your budget isn’t always easy or fun.
At least, there are a couple of quick ways to create a Google Ads budget from scratch.
First, start by researching how much your keywords are going to cost using the Google Keyword Planner tool. This will give you an idea of how much your keywords will cost per click.
Once you’ve done that, you can do some simple calculations to find what you might need to start your budget at.
If you don’t have enough to make that budget work, take a look at what you might be able to cut right now to test Google Ads. Can you cut down one of your other marketing platforms to give it a full test? You might want to keep an eye out for being limited by budget status as well.
If so, it’s time to put that money into action.
Lastly, you have to give it time, monitor your campaigns, and double down if they start performing well!
Have you felt like this recently? Are you unsure if you should stop your Google Paid traffic right now?
You’re not alone, but stay positive. We’re in this together!
We’ve been answering these questions since March by providing data and challenging our members to shift their mindsets.
This has led us to create this blog post. We want to show you what we’re seeing, why you need to change, and how to make those adjustments to WIN in Google Ads during COVID-19 and other events that can cause accounts to go haywire.
What Our Google Ads Data is Showing During COVID-19
Numbers were compared from January 15-February 29 and March 1-April 15.
Sessions from Google Ads have increased by 4.01%.
Sessions are defined as…
“A session is a group of user interactions with your website that takes place within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and eCommerce transactions.”
Leads havedecreased by 13.55%.
Across all members accounts, cost-per-click has increased by 39.3%, and to be expected, the cost per lead has increased by 19.4%.
What does this mean? In “normal times” a conversion issue could mean you’re lacking credibility on your website. Or, not enough website personalization and customization.
During COVID, it’s most likely due to searchers whose comfort level with the current situation is low. This presents a major opportunity to communicate with your audience in a different, more impactful way.
So…
Why Are Leads Down By 13.55%?
Our best-educated hypothesis… there is a lack of communication between your visitors and your website messaging.
Visitors need to know, during this time, that they still have options to sell their house right now. If they’re landing on a page that still has the typical message without educating them about what they can do, they’ll likely bounce for now.
Communication is as important as ever. You need to tell them what they can do during this time where people are uncertain. For example, communicate that they can:
Send photos of their house
Join a video call
Join a Facebook Live for a walk-through
Hop on a phone call
Get the selling process started without ever meeting in person
More on this below…
What Can You Do Right Now to Increase Leads by 33, 100, or Even 225%?!
The members (not all, but MOST) who have made the necessary steps to communicate to their audiences are seeing an increase in lead volume during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We wanted to give you some general tips to help make your Google Ads accounts more effective until this time in history is over.
3 Simple Things You Can Do Today to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Google Ads Accounts
Tip #1: Communicate and Build Relationships With Your Audience
During “normal” times, Google Ads best practices dictate that you dig deep into as much data as you can find so you can be all but certain your next campaign will succeed.
But, we’re in unknown territory holding a lot of uncertainty. No one knows for sure what to totally expect from their accounts right now.
The ones who will have the most success will be those who take their best, common-sensed, educated move and immediately put their campaigns into action.
Think of it this way.
If you don’t try and decide to wait it out, you’ll fall further behind your competitors.
If you make educated moves but fall short, you’ll at the very least have an idea of how to adjust your approach going forward.
You don’t have a lot of time to collect a bunch of performance data… we can help with that.
Your goal should be to find a way to communicate with your audience.
Or, adding more content to your website from blog posts. Carrot Content Pro members have access to blog posts such as…
Or, switch it up a bit and shoot a quick video, such as this Carrot member did…
Now, take your video a step further and create a VideoPost to add to your blog. Simply upload a video and receive a transcription for your content for a blog post in minutes.
This goes for your Google ads and any other paid advertising you create throughout the current pandemic.
Google Ad’s character limitations don’t allow much room to convey a deeply sensitive and empathetic message, but you can utilize space to communicate that you’re still buying as well as other key points.
We’ve seen ads use copy such as:
We’re Still Buying
We Can Rest Your Mind
No Strangers to Your Home
No-Direct Contact Required
You Can Still Sell Your House
A Phone Call Is All It Takes
We Can Buy Via Video, Phone, and Email
You want to create ads that showcase the options they have and the value your service can give them during these circumstances your audience is currently in.
If you can get to the heart of how your services can bring peace and closure to your customers’ lives, during this crisis and other times, you’ll stand a much better chance of surviving and thriving in the future.
Tip #3: Trim Wasted Ad Spend
During “normal” times, it can be easy to keep average-performing ad groups or keywords live as long as they’re bringing in some leads.
But right now a shift to pause those ad groups or keywords and add to negative keyword lists might be a smart approach.
Of course, you can then revive these ad groups and keywords once we’re out of this pandemic.
If you need to cut your budget, a simple strategy would be to pause ad groups and/or keywords that haven’t produced a lead in the past month or two. Or, those ad groups and/or keywords that have converted one or two times in the past month or two.
These might be low-hanging fruit keywords. Choose to pause those for now and hang onto the ad groups and keywords that make the most impact.
Negative keywords will prevent your ads from showing up for future searches that seem to be related to your service but have nothing to do with it.
We’ve seen terms that seem really good but aren’t converting into leads. Such as…
“sell my house in 55+”
So, that term is becoming an exact match negative term for now.
We’ve also seen an influx of game-related terms, possibly due to more kids being without things to do. Terms such as…
“how to sell your house in Rocitizens Boblox”
These are search terms that can’t be predicted.
Even during times like these, the old saying “you gotta spend money to make money” holds true for paid traffic. Merely pausing your campaigns altogether just isn’t the way to go.
But, there are just smarter ways of figuring out the most efficient way to keep your campaigns live.
You should always be looking for the most cost-effective approach to Google ads, but right now, it’s okay to tighten the spending up without feeling like you’re missing out on leads.
Wrapping up
The Google Ads industry changed entirely in the last month. Much of what we considered certainties only a few short weeks ago still remain today, but there are things you need to view a little differently for now.
Adapting during these uncertain times will help you to continue to grow.
It’s likely that you have already come under pressure to reduce spend or, at the very extreme, you’ve paused your account. These are sensible reactions given the circumstances, but are they the only options?
The answers to these questions depend a lot on each individual’s situation, but in this post, we hope to educate you on how to make these positive decisions and how to best adapt Google Ads during these challenging times.
Now is the time to double down on your mindset & your marketing, and show up to serve stronger than ever.
We’re in the middle of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a big deal.
In this weekly podcast series, I’m talking about how you can cope with these rapid changes in the real estate market and economy. I’ll be walking you through how our most successful agents & investors are adapting during these wild times.
When plenty of investors and agents are dialing back their marketing, now is the time to double down. Now is the time to shift your mindset, shift the way you’re doing business, show up for the people counting on you, and maintain momentum in your business.
We’re here for you. And we believe that as a community and as industry, we can come out of this stronger than ever.
Join us, listen in, and please reach out to let us know how we can help.
-Trevor
P.S. – To stay up to date on all Covid-19 news, go here.
May 14: As I predicted, Conversion Rates are Going Up and Content is King
It’s been about 1-2 months since we started to see the impact COVID-19 has had on the real estate industry. But, a few things have changed since then, which is why I want to catch you up to speed on some of the data we’re seeing behind the scenes at Carrot. And, how we see the best agents and investors using content to adapt to the situation and consistently bring in more leads. Listen in.
May 7: Three Changes You Can Make Right Now For a More Consistent & Profitable Business Post-Corona
There are two ways you can respond to a crisis. You can hope it doesn’t happen again, or you can roll with the punches and set up your business for a more stable future. Today I want to share with you a few things I have been teaching for years that apply now more than ever. It’s not too late to implement these so you can get back up on your feet and come out stronger than ever. I’m talking list building, multiple alarms of marketing, and long-term strategy. Listen in.
May 1: Habits vs. Disciplines – My Life Operating System During COVID-19
We’re all having to wade through times right now. But right now also can be time to reflect and be thankful and grateful for opportunities to look at life differently. It’s a perfect time to set some consistently and self-discipline. Too many of us get fired up about something motivational… such as a Tony Robbins speech or heck even this podcast. But what happens is that quick motivation burst fades. You go from a candy high to crashing. Instead, there should be a shift to have a long-term mindset. Shift out of a motivation mindset to something more discipline. Say yes to the hard things and build mental toughness. That’s what we’re going to dive in on and more!
April 23: How Evergreen Marketing is The Key to Winning in Unpredictable Times
Before Carrot, Trevor built multiple businesses that made him money. The problem was, he was burnt out from what we call “hamster wheel marketing”. Those businesses had him continually chasing leads, and when he stopped marketing, the leads would stop coming in. Unpredictable income was causing a lot of stress. This is what lead to the creation of Carrot. Listen in to hear Trevor’s story and find out how you can build a predictable business that brings you real freedom.
April 16: Navigating Happiness & Habits Through Covid-19 w/ Trevor Mauch, Brent Moreno & Adam Johnson
If you’re stuck at home, falling out of your healthy habits, and struggling to find your peace, then you’re not alone. In this episode, Trevor gets up close and personal to show you as a high-performer how you can re-focus on what’s important and rebuild your habits to get back to the best versions of yourself. Listen in and make sure to follow along with the powerful exercise he’ll be teaching in this episode. Carrot.com/habits
April 9: There’s Never Been a Better Time to Take Over iBuyers. Here’s How You Can Do it.
Redfin, Zillow, Offerpad, and Opendoor have all recently suspended their “ibuyer” programs. What this means is a massive opportunity for you as an agent or investor. Not only the opportunity to close deals that ibuyers normally would’ve taken, but to show people that have a higher-value service, with a faster ability to solve their problems. This episode we’re going to show you how you can shift your messaging, continue to consistently (and safely) close deals when others are backing out during these wild times. Listen in.
April 2:How To Adapt Your Marketing & Messaging (The Exact Content You Need to Be Putting Out)
Get the full blog post and Scripts for your content here!
In a crisis like this, people tune out. The marketing that worked for you a few weeks ago, won’t necessarily work right now. But, there’s still hope… we’re talking with agents and investors every day who are still consistently closing deals. Why? Because they’re shifting. Today, we give you specific, real-life examples for agents and investors of exactly what you should be talking about in your content right now…Videos, Blog, Ads, emails, everything word-for-word. You’ve got this.
March 23: What The Epidemic Means for Agents & Investors & Why We’re Doubling Down
We’re living through history right now. Covid-19 has brought on a ton of change in a very short amount of time. News headlines are nonstop, but we still have a lot of questions. What do I do? How can I prepare for the next few months? What about the economy, the housing market, the next recession? Well, that’s why this podcast is my message of encouragement to you, my analysis on what the future holds, and what you should be doing to double down in the most trying times. Here we go…
We want to hear your thoughts on the podcast! Drop them in the comments section below or hit us up on Facebook or Instagram
During this article, I’m going to be talking about how you cope with these major changes in the economy, real estate, and the way that we’re working and living and thriving.
Get Quick Context About This Blog Post Before Diving In…
Listen to the Full Podcast Episode Below
Now everybody’s going to be impacted in some way, shape, or form. But, you don’t have to be impacted negatively.
There are people that I know, businesses that I know, that are actually doing better than ever right now because they’re geared and they’re set up and they planned for things like this. Or, maybe they just got lucky and they have certain products, of course, that are just in high demand for these times.
I’m going to be talking about how to better prepare for what’s to come.
How Do You Come Out on the Other Side of This Stronger?
How do you as a real estate investor or agent plan and prepare for what is going to happen?
I’ll be the first one to admit that I didn’t treat this seriously enough early on. I thought, it’s just this, like a lot of people were saying right, it’s this cold, it’s this flu. The flu numbers kill more people than this is killing. And that was honestly just a full misunderstanding of how pandemics work, a full misunderstanding of how math actually works in these types of situations.
Preparing for the Financial Impact
The financial side is what I want you guys to prepare for. What happens with all the shutdowns? The shutdowns are where the devastating part is on the financial side because there’s the health side of it, which is a huge deal, but it’s going to likely be shorter-lived, months rather than years. The financial side though is where it gets really, really interesting and possibly scary for many people.
So if you have stay-in-place orders in California and Washington (now in Oregon) and all over the place, and kids are out of school here in Oregon until the end of April now rather than just spring break…
That leaves over a month and a half to where parents have to figure out a way that they can work at home while trying to take care of their kids still. We’ve got team members who have multiple kids at home, who are working and they’re trying to do their best work. So we’ve put policies in place to give our team members more flexibility and more leeway during these times. And we said, “We’ll take it two weeks at a time during the next two weeks.”
But, we’re not pumping the brakes.
This is when we actually need to hit the gas more than ever to help our customers more than ever, to help you guys wade through and win in this market.
And that’s where I’m going to come to next because there are so many people doing amazing right now still because so many people are pulling back and I’m going to show you guys exactly how to do that, but we need to be doubling down and helping you guys win even more right now, not pulling back ourselves and going, “Hey, let’s wait and see.”
Don’t Pump the Brakes… Give It More Gas
I think if you have a wait and see attitude, then you’re likely going to get impacted way more negatively than you wish.
We put in the policy, where for the next two weeks, put in the hours that you can. We don’t want you to have to make a decision between being a good father or mother and being a good worker. I would rather have you make the decision to be a good father or mother versus trying to fit in all 40 hours. So if you’re only able to get 35 hours of good work in, good focus work in, awesome. Report the full 40 during these next two weeks, and then we’ll take it two weeks at a time after that.
So if you’re an employer, find out ways that you can really help your team members wade through this. Help your team members have confidence in the way that you’re doing things…wade through it with them.
Next thing, if you’re an employer, you need to be doing weekly updates with your team members at the least. I did one last week, pulled up a bunch of slides and just walked through…
“Hey, here’s what we know about the pandemic so far.”
“Here’s how we can serve you, even more, to make working from home even better than we already have.”
Then the next thing was…
“Let’s go through the financial picture. Let’s go through how much cash reserves we have. How long could we run this business if some big things happen that cut our income by 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, or 50%.”
Now, the 10% is realistic, 20% possibly. 50%, I don’t believe that that would happen, but there are cash reserves that we have and could survive and thrive with that.
I also covered hiring…
“But also here are the plans that we have. Are we going to be adjusting our Q2 plans of growth in our hires? Well, we’re taking some of our hires and moving them to contractor roles until this shakes out.”
We’re not stopping those hires because we need them. We need them to grow, we need them to help serve you guys better. But we’re moving them to contractors instead to kind of add that extra buffer in place.
So that’s another move that you can make. If you have any hires coming up, make them contractors instead of employees the next few months to see how things shake out.
Survive and Thrive
The next thing, I’m going to give you guys some really, really actionable steps. How do you wade through this, thrive, and survive?
The first thing is you have to have reserves.
Let’s look at the foundation level. The people that are going to be getting in trouble are the people that have been kind of running fast and loose the last three, four, five, six years.
Thinking that whatever their situation is, it’s going to go on forever in a good way and not stocking away reserves. So the one thing I’ve always had pretty good discipline in, and then we carried it through the previous years as well, is carving out reserves.
Every quarter we look at our profits and I always set how many months of cash reserves we want for operational expenses for the business. And some people suggest three months, six months a year. I suggest six months is what every business should have in operational cash.
What I mean by operational cash is, what does it actually cost you to run your business? If all of your revenue disappeared, what does it cost you to run your business?
That includes all of your employees, any of your fixed expenses, things like that. Add that up for six months. And then I think that’s what you should have in your bank account for reserves.
As I said, the likelihood that you’re not going to bring in any cash for six months is very low, but at least it gives you breathing room.
Now it gives you time to pivot and adjust and change course if you need to. If you only have a month or two or three months, you’re in crisis mode at that point. You can’t really get very crazy creative and have time to really pull back, think, and pivot. You won’t have the luxury of planning a little bit.
Building Reserves Now
What can you put in place right now to ensure that you’re building up your reserves?
Do that now. Start to stock away cash and start to build up that six months reserve. Do the same thing on the personal side. Start to stock away more cash than you normally would right now. Build it up in reserves, six months, personal expenses, your mortgage…
What does it cost you to live on a personal basis? Do that. The next thing is even if you don’t predict a downturn in your business, start to cut expenses.
Start to look at things like that because we want to plan for the worst, but hope for the best. Okay, plan for the worst, hope for the best. And those of you that are not taking this seriously enough are going to be bitten in the butt in several months possibly.
Now we hope not. But as I started to dig into this, the financial ramifications when parents are staying at home and when businesses are closing, all of a sudden unemployment’s going to go from 3% to 5%, to 20% for the next month or two and unemployment benefits rush in there.
Then all of a sudden you have some people that aren’t able to pay their rent. So what happens to landlords during this time? Well, some landlords might struggle to pay their mortgages because some of their employees might be restaurant workers. They might be workers that are having their position shutdown and they might not be able to pay their rent.
What if you’re landlord, that’s over-leveraged, that doesn’t have cash reserves for a while? That now can’t pay your mortgage. So now you’re going to go behind in your mortgage and then all of a sudden, let’s say a bunch of landlords start to default on their mortgages three months from now or two months from now, then you have some sort of banking issues as well.
The Economy
Now is it going to be the same as what happened back in 2008? Let’s dive into some economic stuff right now.
The likelihood that that is going to happen is extremely low. They’re just totally fundamentally different factors that are happening in the economy right now.
Back in 2001, 9/11, what happened was that it was an event, a terrorist attack, that completely wrecked the economy for a period of months. And it wasn’t because there was something fundamentally wrong with the economy. This event wasn’t a bubble…
But, there was the .com bust that happened several years before that. That was something fundamentally wrong with the economy. There was way too much over-investment in the tech world. No one knew what it was. Too many IPOs that were too overhyped. And there was a bubble that popped.
9/11 an event that was a black swan event. Kind of like this pandemic where it’s outside of most people’s control. It’s not something that you could really easily plan for very well. But it does impact things vastly.
After 9/11 people basically stopped traveling. And when people stop traveling, that sort of decimated the travel industry. Hotels, airlines, the same thing that’s happening right now, which then trickled down into everything else, unemployment rises.
But all that didn’t last for too crazy, crazy long. Go back and look at the history books. Some of it lasted for the course of the year. The travel industry took a little while to recover, that’s for sure. Some stuff bounced back within months. But the overall economy, the stock market did take a hit, but real estate prices continued to appreciate actually.
So real estate prices did not depreciate, they continued to appreciate. That is a little bit different though because that was coming out of the stock market crash, the tech bubble of ’98, ’99, 2000.
Things had already started to kind of improve there a little bit. The difference here is we’re at the end, almost overdue of a bull cycle the past 12 years in the stock market and real estate market.
All these things have been amazing for the past 12 years. And for the past couple of years, I’ve been preparing Carrot and my team for a recession. We don’t know when it’s going to happen, but arguably the current policies are helping to prop up the economy longer than I think it should have been.
Bubble?
So is that creating a bubble? Possibly.
There could be some things there, but this black swan event of the pandemic now started to kick it forward, started to kick it down the curb. I do believe that this will kick off some sort of a step into recession.
Now, will this recession be like it was in 2008? I don’t believe so.
Once again, it doesn’t have the same fundamental economic issues there that the mortgage crisis created. And also, the issue of this time has not related to real estate per se.
The issue last time was directly related to the real estate market being overheated. Too many people buying properties that shouldn’t because it was way too easy to get loans.
We’re not seeing that right now. I don’t predict that real estate prices will take a crash because they haven’t been overinflated as much as previously.
Now, will we take a little bit of a dip in prices? I think so. I think toward the end of the year you might see some markets start to slow down a little bit, but I think it’d be more of a softening.
How Real Estate Agents Have Shifted
In the short term, I’ve been talking with lots of agents about what they’re seeing, what are they experiencing in their world.
The experienced ones aren’t missing the beat.
Some have turned to doing virtual showings now over Zoom or Facebook Live instead of having big open houses. They invite everyone to tune into their Zoom room during a certain time and they walk around the house and they talk about it. And then they give people a tour. They’re still showing houses.
One agent said that there have been buyers who still want to buy but they’re going to kind of tap the brakes and wait this out a little bit. There’s also been a seller or two who didn’t want to have a bunch of people going through their house during this time, which is understandable, but they said, in general, they’re still closing the houses. They closed six houses last week alone.
What a lot of other people are kind of using, they’re letting fear stop them from doing this. They’re assuming because all this stuff is happening, then real estate is not working. That none of this is going to continue to work.
That’s just not the case. That’s just not the case at all.
For more information about the coronavirus and realtors, check out this guide.
How Real Estate Investors Have Shifted
Talking to investors, yes, some are worried about their portfolios because they have so many renters that are lower income. That should be an issue. You should be tight. You should be getting as much cash liquidity right now as you possibly can, just to plan for the worst, hope for the best.
But for people out there flipping houses, wholesaling houses, buying houses, things like that, we’re not really seeing much of a slowdown. Now there are some municipalities that are closed down or they’re not processing transactions.
I talked to Cody Sperber down in Phoenix, Arizona last week. He’s coming out for a podcast issue for CarrotCast here shortly. Cody did say that he had a transaction or two canceled at escrow, but what we’re seeing is more around the financers. It’s more on funding. It’s more on the private lenders that are pulling… They’re tapping the brakes a bit.
Let us wait and see this out. Let us dampen our risk in this process. And let’s wait for a month or two before we start to deploy cash, so that’s what you are going to see some private lenders doing that.
Now, how do you contend with that?
Well, number one, you need to be going to your private lenders if you’re a house buyer, and talking with them and educating them on what opportunities there are in the market and how you’re safeguarding their investments.
Go to them right now and talk. Do a Zoom call with your investors and talk to them about the market, about what you’re seeing on the ground, about what other investors are seeing locally, about how you’re going to safeguard in their investment during this time, but also about the opportunity that there is going to be, in this time, to add more value and have them get even greater returns.
That needs to be done. You need to be reaching out to your investors right now to continue to build that relationship, to continue to build that trust and credibility with them so they’re comfortable in these crazy times.
The next thing, if you’re a flipper or a wholesaler is, there’s so many of you who are tapping the brakes on your marketing and you’re going, “I’m going to wait this out.”
That is insane right now. That is the worst thing you can possibly do.
Here’s Cody Sperber’s Game Plan During the Current Situation…
You Have an Audience Right Now
Right now you have some of the biggest captive audience possible out there for people to see your marketing message. Mail is still being delivered. There’s no plan, it doesn’t seem, for mail to stop being delivered. Phone calls are still being answered. Even more now so, because people are at home and possibly home from work.
People are going online and still doing the searches.
In some categories, they’re doing more searches than they were before. For house sellers, we saw a dip a couple of weeks ago. We’re going to look at the data and see. It’s barely, it’s like 10% or so.
According to a recent WordStream study, search traffic in the real estate industry remains relatively stable, as well as little change to search volume, CPC, or conversion rates.
But as we move into the next two or three weeks, some important shifts could have some important industry consequences.
What Can You Expect?
What I predict is people looking for investment properties might be kind of pulling back some of their demand right now.
I predict while in that first phase of the pandemic fear to happen, I think a lot of people will pause just because they don’t know what else to do. They’ll pause out of fear, they’ll pause meaning, “I want to wait a little bit to see what happens before I sell my house.”
But here’s the deal. If they start to have income issues, if they already had an issue with the property they’re needing to sell, and now he gets exacerbated with the economy, what’s only going to happen now is as the weeks go on…
That pain is going to actually increase.
So, if you’re an agent or if you’re an investor, you need to be out there solving people’s pain. This isn’t about taking advantage of people. There’s not one lick of that here.
What we need to be doing, as a society, is finding out how can we solve people’s pain.
How can we truly solve problems? How can we truly add value to people’s worlds right now when they need it the most and some people need it right now more than ever?
Right now is not the time to hit the brakes, right now is not the time to pull back and say, “I’m going to wait and see it out.”
Right now is not the time to pull your marketing back, right now is actually the time to double up on your marketing and increase your spend on marketing.
I was talking to Christina Krause, one of the biggest direct mail marketing consultants for investors and she said her three biggest clients have made their largest purchases ever with her these past two to three weeks. That says a lot!
So why is that? Because what they’re doing is there’s a lot of print houses, mail shops and things like that, that might be shutting down for business for a while, if there is a stay-at-home, a stay-at-place order. And a lot of those shops might be in California or some other states where they’re doing stay-at-home orders.
Get your orders in right now… To get your mailing pieces printed off before any stay-at-home orders are done.
Make those big orders and then pull back. The post office doesn’t seem like they’re shutting things down. Could that change? It could.
Make those orders, get your direct mail pieces in because what happens if you try to place your order and then they’re slowing down business for two weeks, all of a sudden you’re two to three weeks behind, maybe even four weeks behind because now they have a stockpile of orders they need to process.
You’re two to four weeks behind on getting mail out to people when they need it the most. Then those who are getting mail out consistently and often during these times are going to come out the other side winning.
Those who are going and looking at their Google PPC costs and saying, “Hey, there’s people.” What you’re going to see right now is people diminishing or stopping their PPC, their spend.
You’re going to see people stopping their PPC spend because, out of fear, because they’re seeing, “oh my gosh, my click cost is $45 a click or $25 a click and my leads are $300, oh my gosh.” But that’s if you’re trusting emotion, not math.
You need to go back to the fundamentals we’ve been teaching for years…
TRUST MATH NOT EMOTION
If your average profit per deal is $20,000, your for-average-commission per deal as an agent is $10,000 and as an investor, let’s say, after that $20,000 profit, it takes you 10 inbound online leads through PPC or through SEO to close the deal, which is about average, right around there, 10 to 15.
I would just about average, the highest lead to close ratio you can get with any lead. Any lead, as an agent and an investor, so if you’re closing one in 10 and your average property is $20,000 and you’d be willing to trade $5,000 to get that $20,000 deal done in marketing, that means you can pay up to $500 per lead and win the market.
And there are so many people cutting and killing their pay-per-click at $150 a lead, at $95 a lead at $225 a lead, because their neighbor over here is getting leads for $22 or $5 on Facebook or because they’re fearful.
Right now is when you need to actually look at your numbers again and say…
“I’m going to double down on this. I’m going to spend even more. I’m going to make sure I’m answering these phone calls quicker.”
Stay in front of those sellers and help serve them even better. Make sure to give them multiple different offers.
Can you imagine if, in this market right now, where there’s a lot of things happening and there are people who are wanting to sell, a guy like Eric comes in and says,
“Hey, here are three options…
#1…List it for the most money in your pocket.
#2… I can pay cash, but it’s going to be a discount, but it’s immediate and you don’t have to worry about repairs or anything.
#3… Or, I see there’s an opportunity to renovate your kitchen and your bathroom and add $60,000 in value with a $20,000 investment. I will put in the $20,000. I’ll bring in my construction crew. Then afterward, you and I will split the difference between the equity that was gained…
…On that extra equity where it’s going to add $50,000 in extra equity, I’m going to get my $20,000 back for the renovations, which leaves $30,000 left, and we’re going to split that. You’re going to get $15,000 extra over and above what you would’ve got if you’d have just listed it as is. I’m going to get $15,000. Then I’m also going to get the listing over here for the rest of the principle. Okay?”
Be Creative Right Now
Here are three things I want you guys to do right now.
First, create reserves for personal and for business.
Make sure you have six months reserves in the bank. Now, if you don’t have six months reserves in the bank, then should you freak out? No, but you should prepare for it. You should pull back and go, “What expenses can I trim right now where I can start to build up more reserves?”
Stop spending on the ice cream. Stop spending on things that don’t matter. Cut the Netflix subscription for awhile. Whatever you have to do, start building up cash reserves, not just for the pandemic, but if a recession does kick in, there’s always amazing opportunity, but only for those who are prepared, only for those who actually are ready for capitalizing on this opportunity with cash or with partners who have cash.
Second, go out there and start building relationships with private investors.
Start to build relationships with those private lenders because those people are the people that have been piling cash for years, and they want opportunities in the market when those opportunities arise.
Start to build relationships with people that are well-off in your area. Ask them about what their plans are, tell them about what you’re doing in real estate, and start to get them interested in it.
Don’t ask them for money, but if you talk about what you’re doing enough, they will be interested, they will ask you, and they will say, “Hey, yeah, that sounds amazing. Let’s chat about it.” Okay? How do you make sure that you are being proactive in building those relationships right now?
Third, grow during these times.
I don’t want you to pull back. I talked about before how there’s going to be a lot of people who are going to be doing the, “Let’s sit and wait.”
There’s going to be a lot of people who are doing the pullback and like, “I’ll pull back out of fear because I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Now is NOT the time to pull back, NOT the time to pull back business strategy-wise, NOT the time to pull back investment-wise and marketing.
Right now is the time to double down. If you’re an agent, get a darn Zoom account and start talking with your customers over Zoom. If you’re a personal trainer, start to do personal training from home with Zoom. Get creative right now, guys. Don’t hit the brakes on that stuff.
What I want you guys to do is grow personally right now.
Understandably, there are many people who are unsure and worried right now. But, don’t treat this as a vacation. This is not the time to treat this as a vacation.
Now is not the time to say, “Hey, this is where I can lighten up my load.” Now is the time when you need to get really diligent and grow personally. Read personal growth books.
This is the time when you need to actually double down on your learning. This is the time when you actually needed to take courses or focus on family.
We need to be more diligent, which means acting more decisively, which means less wasting our time, which means tackling an opportunity that’s in front of us and not doing the sit and wait.
It means being innovative and being creative and adding more value than you’ve ever, ever added in your business ever before.
Don’t pull back. Step in. Lean into this. Be healthy. Stay away from people if you have to, but get creative. We’re going to weather this with you. We’re insanely positive about this. Agents and investors are not stopping their transactions right now.
They’re still meeting with sellers physically or over Zoom. They’re still meeting with a buyer physically or having open houses over Zoom. Investors are doing the same.
Investors are doubling down on their marketing right now because they need to get that marketing out for the next three, four, five, six, seven weeks while people are really needing your services now more than ever.
They’re not pumping the brakes.
This is where you need credibility in your business more than ever right now. You need credibility. You need online credibility. You need performance from your Carrot system.
I’ll give you guys another update in the next week or two on pandemic stuff and how you can really strategically go out there and market better and differently and how you can change your business to work more remotely during these times.
Direct mail is all amount momentum and consistency. Once you have that momentum, don’t break it, keep it going and you will see the magic begin to happen.
Christina Krause
Direct Mail Masterclass #4 | The One Missing Piece To Your Direct Mail Marketing w/ Christina Krause
We’re coming at you with part 4 of our 4-part series on direct mail marketing for real estate. In the last two episodes of this series, we sat down with Todd Swaggerty of Yellow Letter HQ to get his take on direct mail marketing for real estate, what you should be mailing, and when. We talked about lists and how to hone in on your ideal clients.
She’s been with us at CarrotCamp and at our Market Leader Summit. I am super excited for this episode as we sit down and dive deeper into tracking, training, metrics, and all of the insanely strategic things Christina does for her clients.
So get out a pen, get comfortable, and get ready to learn about what your direct mail campaign may be missing: DATA.
Here at Carrot, we will always advocate for a well-rounded marketing mix. Your PPC, your direct mail, and your social campaigns are all just pieces of a larger puzzle.
When done correctly, each part of your marketing mix will amp each other up. Your offline marketing supporting your offline marketing and vice versa. This is why we are so excited about this series covering direct mail for real estate.
To close out the series, having Christina on was a perfect choice. Her data-driven lead-gen has been helping real estate investors all over the country get more leads and close more deals.
While her company isn’t a mail house, they do oversee the campaign from start to finish. They will generate leads, oversee the mailings, and most importantly, track the data throughout the entire sales pipeline.
Mailing To The Right People
For her clients, Christina will often run a direct mail campaign that is 90% postcards and 10% letters. According to the data, letters have a higher response rate but will cost more to send. As such, the letters are reserved for the highest value leads. To find the highest value leads, you’ll have to get the right lists, study the data, and track everything!
Using Direct Mail For Real Estate? What You Should Be Tracking…
You see the threads on all the real estate websites. People will say to do this or don’t do that. Put this on your mailpiece. Don’t put this on your mail piece. Taking the advice of people online can help you learn a thing or two, but to know what is going to work for your business you’ll have to do some testing. You want to put your money into things that are working, not hearsay from things you read online.
Tracking your results is the only way to know what works. Christina recommends these three KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators.
Your Response Rate – This is anyone who called you because of your postcard. Even if they asked to be taken off of your list, your mailer got their attention and initiated a response. Be sure to remove any dupes, only counting unique callers.
Your Net Lead Rate – Now how many of those people who called actually had a house they are ready to sell? This is your net lead rate. Even if they aren’t ready to sell today, they may be ready in the future. These people need to be put into a follow-up sequence as they are a potential lead. (More on following up later…) When looking at the numbers, you should aim to have 50% of your calls be net leads.
Your Appointment Booking Rate – Of those net leads, how many are you able to schedule an appointment with? As Christina says, you should be aggressively booking appointments. Getting in front of your potential client’s faces is huge. Try to set appointments with 30% of your net leads.
Closed Deals – As a good rule of thumb, 10% of those appointments you go on should turn into deals.
To get even more granular with the tracking, you can use different phone numbers for your different segments. There are many companies that can get this set up for you, even using Google Voice to set up multiple numbers that ring to one place can work.
Tracking all this data may seem overwhelming, but if you have a CRM (And you should have a CRM), it should be able to do all of the work for you. If you are just getting started out and don’t have a CRM in place, you can just as easily take out a pen and a piece of paper to track these things yourself.
Creating A Mailpiece That Gets Attention
Letters have a higher response rate than postcards. Part of this being that people simply like receiving mail. Having a first-class stamp as opposed to a bulk-rate marking is another way to add value to your mail piece.
Another interesting thing Christina recommends is to use envelopes with a point that seal with a sticker as opposed to the straight-edged one that you moisten to secure. Pointed envelopes are easier to open, this increasing your response rate.
If sending a postcard, less is more. You will want to get your message across in as few words as possible. One one side, state what you can offer. The other side can offer a few more details as well as a way to contact you.
People taking the time to read your postcard will have piqued interest and will want to dig a little deeper into who you are. Including the link to your Carrot site on your postcard will improve your credibility.
A great tip Christina offered is to send the mailer to yourself. When rifling through your mail, does the piece grab your attention? You may see something on your computer and think it looks great.
But that same mail piece may give off a completely different feel when you see it in person, amongst your other pieces of mail. Before sending out a mailer, Christina will send it to herself and to her staff for feedback.
The Biggest Mistakes People Are Making With Their Direct Mail Marketing for Real Estate
Christina and her team are responsible for millions of mail pieces each month. She’s worked with clients all over the country and she sees the things that help people succeed, vs. the mistakes that cause them to fail. You could have a great list and a great mail piece, but the path to conversion doesn’t stop there.
Untrained Sales People
Leads are not created equally. So many salespeople have grown accustomed to dealing with leads that come in from the internet, people who have been searching for a way to sell a home.
With direct mail marketing, the leads are a bit different. Your mailer got their attention, but they hadn’t been out there searching you out. With these leads, you are introducing a concept, which requires a bit more nurturing. You will be having a different conversation with them and cannot give up easily.
Lack of Momentum and Consistency
With direct mail, it is all about momentum and consistency. It will take a little bit to get things dialed in, but as Christina says, there is magic to that fourth month of direct mail marketing. Some people will stop around this time because they aren’t able to handle all of the leads. But unless you are able to find a way to handle it and keep things going, you will have to start all over again when you decide to start another campaign.
Lack Of Follow-Up
Another problem Christina sees is a lack of follow up. 60-70-% of your deals will come from follow-up. You need to get these leads into a follow-up sequence, hitting them with your message from all angles. You can call, email, and retarget via Facebook.
Wrapping up this series, I want to leave you with this: your offline marketing will drive your online demand. Your website is just a piece of the pie.
You need to use direct mail to activate people who may not have been thinking about selling. Using direct mail marketing for real estate will help you to scale, grow your business, and ultimately close more deals.
Having good real estate backlinks can provide a huge boost in your organic rankings. However, if you do them wrong, the effect can devastate your rankings, sending them into the Google abyss. That is why educating yourself before starting a link-building strategy is critical.
Demo Carrot: How many deals are you losing to your competitor’s website?
In the world of real estate websites, backlinks are like gold. They’re essentially links from other websites that point back to yours. Search engines see these backlinks as a vote of confidence in your content and expertise.
The more high-quality backlinks you have from relevant real estate websites, news outlets, or local directories, the higher your website will rank in search results for local homebuyers and sellers. This translates to increased online visibility, attracting more qualified leads and ultimately growing your real estate business.
Why Are Real Estate Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are a major piece of the SEO (search engine optimization) puzzle.
They go together like peanut butter and jelly. You need one to make the other better.
High-level, here are four quick reasons why it’s important to have a good backlink strategy:
Backlinks are how Google (and other search engines) find your pages.
Backlinks are a way to show Google that you have a solid reputation. Search engines will push searchers to websites they can trust.
Here’s an example. When someone types “sell my house in [market city]” or “real estate agent in [market city]” into Google, you want your website to come up on the first page.
If it doesn’t, you’re missing out on a lot of website traffic, leads, and, more importantly, deals.
Some 93% of internet experiences start with a search engine, including the real estate industry. When people — your target market — are looking for help, they go to Google.
And if you show up on the first page, that’s good for business.
Two of the most powerful factors for ranking in Google are website traffic and backlink portfolio.
In other words, the more traffic and backlinks a page on your website receives, the better that page will rank for your target keyword phrases.
Unfortunately, getting traffic and backlinks is one of the most difficult things. This article will give you practical tips for promoting your content and building links to your website.
Here are nine real estate backlinks strategies to help improve a website’s authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines.
1. Consistent Content Creation
This is your first step on the way to building your SEO rankings. Without consistently creating blog content for your website, you might rank for a few keyword phrases on your homepage. Still, you won’t rank for any longtail keyword phrases (like “how to deal with foreclosure” or “how to sell my how during a divorce”).
Think of every piece of content like a door to your website. The more doors you have, the more people can visit your website, and the more opportunities you have to rank in Google. A good rule of thumb, though, is to create only one piece of content for each keyword phrase you’re targeting.
While consistently creating content can be time-consuming, our Grow plans at Carrot include done-for-you blog content. You just need to customize about 25% of each post and publish it!
Many of our members, like Ryan Dossey, consistently get SEO leads from those done-for-you blog posts!
But maybe you want to create your own unique content—no problem! We’ve created VideoPost, which you can use to transcribe video content into a blog post with the click of a button—learn more here.
2. Building Backlinks with Local Citations
Getting listed in relevant directories isn’t just about backlinks, it’s about building your online presence and local SEO. Here’s why citations are crucial and how to find the best ones for your real estate website:
What are Citations?
Citations are online mentions of your real estate business, including your name, address, and phone number (NAP). These mentions can appear on various online platforms like:
Local Business Directories: Yelp, Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, etc.
Industry-Specific Directories: Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, LoopNet (commercial real estate), etc.
Local Government Websites: City or county government websites often list licensed real estate agents.
Chamber of Commerce Listings: Joining your local chamber can provide valuable directory listings.
Benefits of Citations:
Improved Local Search Ranking: Search engines like Google rely on consistent NAP citations across the web to verify your business legitimacy and location. The more accurate and consistent your citations are, the higher your website will rank in local search results for relevant real estate keywords.
Increased Online Visibility: Citations help potential clients discover your business when searching for real estate agents online. These listings often display basic contact information, reviews, and sometimes even links to your website, directing more traffic your way.
Backlink Potential: Many high-quality directories provide backlinks to your website, further boosting your SEO.
Finding the Right Directories:
Focus on Relevance: Don’t just submit your website to every directory you find. Prioritize directories relevant to your location, the real estate niche you serve, and those trusted by potential clients.
Local Directories First: Start with local business directories and industry-specific real estate platforms.
Use Online Tools: Several online tools like Moz Local or Yext can help you find high-quality directories and manage your citations across different platforms.
Maintaining Accuracy:
Once you’ve claimed your listings on relevant directories, ensure your NAP information is consistent across all platforms. Any inconsistencies can negatively impact your local SEO. Regularly monitor and update your listings as needed.
By building a strong citation profile through local directories, you establish your real estate business online, improve your local search rankings, and potentially earn valuable backlinks to your website. This comprehensive approach strengthens your online presence and attracts more qualified leads.
3. HARO
HARO (for Help A Reporter Out) is a great way to build backlinks and market authority simultaneously. Journalists sign up for HARO to get quotes and contributions from market experts. You can sign up for HARO (for free) to become a source of expertise for journalists.
Oftentimes, if they choose to quote you, they’ll also give you a backlink.
Heck, you could even outsource this to a VA if you want. You can learn more about using HARO to build backlinks.
4. #Journorequest
The hashtag #JournoRequest is another direct line to journalists writing online articles and seeking expert contributions.
By searching the hashtag on Twitter, your page will populate with many different online writers looking for specific types of contributions. They’ll have no problem providing a backlink in return most of the time.
Again, this is so simple that you could pay a VA to scour Twitter for you and look for backlink-building contribution opportunities. You’ll have to provide them with expert quotes when they find one.
5. Establishing Yourself as the Local Real Estate Expert: Building Trust and Backlinks
Becoming a local resource in the real estate market isn’t just about generating leads; it’s about building trust, establishing expertise, and attracting backlinks through valuable community engagement. Here are some strategic ways to position yourself as the go-to expert:
1. Offer Free Consultations and Resources:
Free Consultations: Provide potential clients with free consultations to discuss their buying or selling needs. This allows you to showcase your knowledge, build rapport, and demonstrate your commitment to their success.
Host Educational Seminars: Organize workshops or seminars on topics relevant to your target audience, such as “First-Time Homebuyer Tips” or “The Benefits of Selling Your Home in Today’s Market.” This establishes you as a thought leader and positions your website as a resource for valuable information.
Create Free Downloadable Resources: Develop downloadable guides, checklists, or market reports that provide valuable insights for buyers and sellers. Make these resources freely available on your website with clear calls to action encouraging visitors to explore your services.
2. Participate in Local Events:
Industry Events: Network with other professionals at real estate conferences, workshops, or association meetings. These events provide opportunities to build relationships, exchange knowledge, and potentially collaborate on future projects.
Community Events: Actively participate in local community events like charity fundraisers, neighborhood clean-up initiatives, or local festivals. This demonstrates your commitment to the community and fosters positive brand recognition. Sponsor local events to gain further visibility and establish your brand as a trusted local partner.
3. Partner with Local Businesses:
Strategic Collaborations: Partner with businesses that complement your real estate services, such as mortgage lenders, title companies, or home inspectors. Cross-promote each other’s services and leverage each other’s audience reach.
Local Publications: Connect with local newspapers, online publications, or radio stations. Offer your expertise as a guest speaker or interviewee on topics related to the real estate market. This provides valuable exposure and potential backlinks when your website is mentioned as a resource.
Offer Free Content to Local Websites: Contribute informative articles or blog posts to local publications or neighborhood websites. These guest posts establish you as an expert and can include backlinks to your website for further information.
By actively engaging with your local community, offering valuable resources, and demonstrating your expertise, you build trust and brand recognition. This can lead to local publications featuring you as a resource, potentially including backlinks to your website, further boosting your local SEO and attracting organic traffic. Remember, becoming a local resource is a long-term strategy that pays off with increased brand loyalty, trust, and ultimately, more qualified leads.
6. QuuuPromote
QuuuPromote is a service where you can pay to get Twitter shares for your content. Here’s how it works…
There are two sides to Quuu’s business model. The first side comprises “influencers” who want to post quality content on their Twitter feed automatically — they pay Quuu to do just that.
The second side of Quuu’s business model is made of people (like you!) who have good content and want to get that content shared on Twitter — Quuu then posts that content on the “influencer’s” Twitter feeds.
So yeah… from a business model perspective, Quuu is having their cake and eating it, too. But it’s relatively inexpensive and worth trying if you want more shares and clicks (inside your Quuu dashboard, you can see how many clicks your promotions get).
7. Leveraging Social Media Promotion for Backlinks:
Social media platforms offer a powerful tool to promote your real estate content and attract backlinks. Here’s how to maximize your efforts:
1. Identify Your Target Audience:
Platforms: Not all social media platforms are created equal. Focus on platforms where your target audience spends their time (e.g., Facebook groups for local residents, LinkedIn for industry professionals).
Communities: Join relevant Facebook groups, online forums, and subreddits focused on real estate in your area or niche.
2. Content Strategy for Backlinks:
Post Consistently: Regularly share valuable content like blog posts, local market updates, home buying tips, or visually appealing property listings.
Optimize for Sharing: Include clear calls to action, encouraging viewers to share your content. Use relevant hashtags and engaging visuals to increase shareability.
3. Engage and Build Relationships:
Be a Valuable Contributor: Don’t just post your content and disappear. Participate in discussions, answer questions, and offer helpful advice. Establish yourself as a trusted resource within the community.
Collaborate with Others: Look for opportunities to collaborate with other real estate agents, lenders, or local businesses on social media campaigns. Cross-promotion can expand your reach and attract backlinks from their audience.
8. Turn Dead Ends into Backlink Opportunities
Broken link building is an effective strategy for acquiring backlinks by identifying and replacing outdated or non-functional links on relevant real estate websites. Here’s how to refine this tactic and maximize your chances of success:
1. Finding Broken Links:
Free and Paid Tools: Utilize free tools like Check My Links or Broken Link Check. Consider premium tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush for more advanced features and website crawling capabilities.
Focus on Local Relevance: Prioritize websites related to real estate in your local market. Look for local news outlets, neighborhood association websites, or even competitor websites (avoid anything malicious).
Target Relevant Pages: Focus on pages that discuss topics relevant to your content. For example, if you have a blog post on “The Best Schools in [Your Neighborhood],” target websites with broken links on pages about local schools or family-friendly neighborhoods.
2. Crafting Your Outreach Message:
Personalize Your Approach: Avoid generic templates. Research the website owner or editor and personalize your email with their name and a brief mention of their website.
Highlight the Issue: Concisely explain that you discovered a broken link on one of their pages (mention the specific page and URL).
Offer a Valuable Solution: Present your website and a relevant blog post or resource that offers valuable content as a perfect replacement for the broken link. Briefly explain why your content aligns with their website’s theme and audience needs.
Focus on Mutual Benefit: Frame your message as a win-win situation. You’re helping them improve their website while potentially earning a valuable backlink for your own.
Include Call to Action (CTA): End your email with a clear call to action, politely requesting them to consider your suggestion and replace the broken link with your content.
3. Increase Your Success Rate:
Quality Over Quantity: Focus on reaching out to high-quality websites with relevant traffic and domain authority. A few backlinks from high-authority sites are more valuable than many from low-quality sources.
Track Your Efforts: Use a spreadsheet or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool to track the websites you contacted, the broken links you reported, and the responses you receive. This helps monitor your progress and identify areas for improvement.
Follow Up, But Don’t Be Pushy: Send a polite follow-up email a few days after your initial contact if you haven’t heard back. However, avoid being overly persistent.
By implementing these steps, broken link building can become a valuable strategy for acquiring backlinks from relevant websites. Remember, focus on providing a genuine solution and building relationships with website owners. This approach leads to higher success rates and strengthens your online presence in the real estate market.
9. Mastering Guest Blogging for Real Estate Backlinks: Attract New Clients and Boost SEO
Guest blogging on relevant websites is a powerful strategy for building backlinks, establishing yourself as an expert, and attracting potential clients in a new market segment. Here’s how to maximize your guest blogging efforts for real estate:
1. Identify High-Impact Websites:
Go Beyond the Obvious: While local news outlets and mortgage lenders are good starting points, delve deeper. Consider websites like:
Local Business Associations: Chambers of Commerce, neighborhood associations, or niche-specific business groups often have publications or blogs.
Community Websites: Look for websites catering to your target audience, like local parenting blogs, neighborhood guides, or relocation resources.
Industry Blogs: Target real estate blogs with a national reach that allow guest contributions, focusing on topics relevant to your niche (e.g., luxury properties, first-time homebuyers, investment real estate).
2. Craft Compelling Guest Post Ideas:
Focus on Value, Not Sales: Your primary goal is to provide valuable information to the target audience of the host website. Research their readership and tailor your content to their needs.
Address Local and Regional Trends: Offer insights specific to your market. This can be anything from “The Benefits of Owning in [Your Neighborhood]” to “Local Market Update: Rising Interest Rates in [Your City].”
Target Buyer Personas: Craft content geared towards specific buyer personas, such as “First-Time Homebuyer Mistakes to Avoid” or “[Your City]’s Best Neighborhoods for Growing Families.”
Showcase Your Expertise: While offering valuable information, subtly weave in your expertise. Briefly mention relevant past experiences or successful transactions to establish your credibility.
3. The Art of the Pitch:
Research the Editor: Don’t send generic emails. Identify the editor responsible for the blog section and personalize your outreach.
Highlight Your Value Proposition: In a concise email, explain who you are, your area of expertise, and how your guest post aligns with the website’s audience and content strategy.
Provide Content Samples: Include links to your best blog posts or published articles showcasing your writing style and expertise.
Negotiate Backlinks: While not always possible, politely negotiate the inclusion of a backlink to your website within the guest post or author bio section.
4. Building Relationships:
Go Beyond the Single Post: Don’t treat guest blogging as a one-time transaction. Engage with the website after your post is published. Respond to comments, participate in discussions, and build rapport with the editor and audience.
Reciprocal Opportunities: If the website allows it, explore collaborative opportunities. You could offer to host a guest post from their editor on your website, further expanding your reach and promoting valuable content exchange.
Here are a couple of cold outreach templates to get you started.
For podcasts…
Subject: Quick idea…
Hey [name of person or business]!
My name is [name] and I’m a real estate [investor/agent] in [location]. My business has [build credibility with revenue numbers, media mentions, or a testimonial from a past customer]. And I’d LOVE to be a guest on your podcast to discuss [pitch a relevant topic you’d be comfortable discussing].
What do you think? Is that something we could set up?
Let me know! I’d be happy to get it on the calendar. :-)
Cheers,
[Name]
For blog posts…
Subject: Quick idea…
Hey [name of person or business]!
My name is [name] and I’m a real estate [investor/agent] in [location]. My business has [build credibility with revenue numbers, media mentions, or a testimonial from a past customer]. And I’d LOVE to write an article for your website. Here’s my idea: [pitch a relevant topic you’d be comfortable writing about].
What do you think?
Let me know! I’d be happy to get started on it right away. :-)
Cheers,
[Name]
By implementing these strategies, guest blogging becomes a powerful tool for building backlinks, attracting new clients, and establishing yourself as a trusted real estate expert within your local and potentially broader online communities. Remember, guest blogging is a long-term strategy focused on building relationships and providing value, ultimately leading to increased brand awareness and website traffic that converts to qualified leads.
WARNING: Avoid These 2 Link-Building & SEO Tactics
Regarding SEO, it’s not just important to use the right strategies. It’s also important that you don’t use the wrong strategies.
Shady link-building tactics- often called “black-hat SEO”- can penalize your website by Google and completely destroy your rankings.
For that reason, we recommend avoiding the following link-building tactics…
1. PBNs
Look, building backlinks is difficult. It’s time-consuming, expensive, and soul-crushing.
We all know it.
Which is exactly why PBNs are so darn tempting…
These services promise to build backlinks to your website at a remarkably low cost and get your website ranking quickly. They won’t say much about how they will build those backlinks, but the promise of seeing your website on the first page of Google’s results is enough to persuade most of us to enter our credit card information.
Since they won’t tell you how they build your website backlinks, I will…
In a nutshell, they purchase hundreds or thousands of expired/unused domains with a bit of SEO juice built from the previous owners. Then, they go to all these domains and plug a backlink to your website.
After a bit, your website starts to rank, and you’re thinking, “Wow! These guys are awesome!”
Here’s the problem: PBNs cheat the system. Google explicitly says that using a PBN won’t only get the PBN company in trouble but also penalize your website.
It’ll all be good and fine until Google finds out. And they almost always find out.
Once they do, your website will take a massive dive in the rankings (or get banned from indexing altogether) – and recovering from that loss will be harder than trying to get a new website ranking (because you’ve lost Google’s trust).
2. Paying for Backlinks
Paying for backlinks can be a bad idea for a few reasons:
It can hurt your SEO: Search engines like Google frown upon unnatural link building practices. If they catch you buying backlinks, they might penalize your website, causing it to rank lower in search results instead of higher.
Low-quality links can be worse than no links: Not all backlinks are created equal. Buying backlinks often means getting links from irrelevant or low-quality websites. These links won’t help your SEO and might even hurt your reputation.
Wasted money: There’s no guarantee that the backlinks you buy will improve your rankings. You might be throwing money away on ineffective strategies.
Unsustainable: Building backlinks naturally takes time and effort, but it’s a more sustainable strategy. Paid backlinks are often temporary, requiring constant reinvestment to maintain any SEO benefit.
Risk of getting flagged: Google has sophisticated algorithms to detect unnatural link building practices. Getting caught can lead to serious penalties, harming your website’s visibility for a long time.
Google explicitly says it doesn’t want people paying for backlinks, but this no-no has a caveat.
If you’re going to pay for backlinks, pay for good white-hat backlinks — ones that come from real sites with real domain authority in Google’s eyes. And be very careful about buying cheap links from sites that promise quick and fast results.
Ideally, your real estate backlinks should come from sites with low spam scores. Ask any SE firm you’re considering hiring how they build backlinks and where those links come from. That will tell you a lot about whether those links are high-quality.
Top Backlink Tools
1. Backlink Analysis Tools:
Help you discover backlinks pointing to your website and competitor websites.
Analyze the quality and source of backlinks (authority, relevance).
Track the number of backlinks over time and identify any lost backlinks.
Examples: Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, SEMrush Backlink Tool, Majestic
2. Link Building Tools:
Help you identify link building opportunities.
Suggest relevant websites where you can potentially acquire backlinks.
May offer features like outreach management or content creation suggestions.
Examples: Ahrefs, SEMrush Link Building Tool, BuzzSumo, BuzzStream
3. Broken Link Building Tools:
Help you find broken links on relevant websites.
Allow you to suggest your own content as a valuable replacement for the broken link.
This can be a great way to acquire backlinks while helping the website owner improve their content.
Examples: Check My Links, Broken Link Checker, Ahrefs Broken Backlinks report (part of their Backlink Analysis Tool)
4. SEO Suite Tools:
Offer a comprehensive suite of SEO tools, including backlink analysis, keyword research, on-page optimization tools, and website crawling capabilities.
Examples: SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz Pro
Important Note:
Some of these tools are free, with limited features, while others require a paid subscription.
The best tool for you will depend on your specific needs and budget.
Additional Tips:
Focus on building high-quality, natural backlinks from relevant websites.
Avoid buying backlinks or participating in link schemes, as this can hurt your SEO in the long run.
Combine backlink building with other SEO strategies like creating high-quality content and optimizing your website for relevant keywords.
How to Track Your Rankings (Pay Attention to These 3 KPIs!)
You can build real estate backlinks and drive traffic to your website until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t track your progress and the results of those actions… then, well, it’s hard to know if all that hard work has been worth it.
So here are the primary KPIs you’ll want to pay attention to and exactly how you can track those KPIs…
Target Keyword Rankings — When discussing SEO, this is the first thing you should pay attention to. Is the page you created ranking for the phrase you want it to rank for? Is it fluctuating up or down the rankings? As a Carrot member, you get access to our easy-to-use keyword ranking tracker that will alert you to any recent fluctuations in position.
Page Traffic Volume — Page traffic is an important element of SEO progress because 1) more traffic typically means better rankings, and 2) well… more traffic is an excellent thing for lead generation. The easiest way to watch website traffic as a Carrot member is right inside your dashboard’s “Stats” tab…
Scroll down to see how much traffic each page of your website gets and even where all that traffic is coming from.
Page Conversion Rate — This is the end goal, right? If you build backlinks and promote content, even if you drive traffic to your website, but those visitors don’t convert into leads, what’s the point? You should expect at least a 2% conversion rate from your blog posts and 10% from your homepage. If your conversion rate is lower than that, check out this article. To check your conversion rate as a Carrot member, go to your “Stats” dashboard, scroll down, and look at the “Conv. Rate” column.
Now that you understand what KPIs to monitor for your SEO efforts let’s discuss how to promote your content and get backlinks!
Conclusion
There you have it!
You should now understand how to build your SEO rankings with real estate backlinks and content promotion.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them in the comments, and we’ll help you out however we can! Good luck!
