This has to STOP… Obviously, you want more traffic and leads, right? We’ve all struggled to increase website traffic, and every lead guru has a big bag of tricks they’re eager for you to try. But… it’s a heck of a lot simpler than that.
All you need to do is fix these 4 common reasons that are often neglected by real estate website owners either because they don’t understand their importance or because they are not sure how to approach them.
Hey guys and girls, Trevor here coming at you with another whiteboard strategy sketch and these are getting really, really fun.
I don’t know how many we have done so far but we have a lot more in store for you guys and keep the questions coming because the way that we come up with these things right here is from questions directly from you guys. Send them to us at support@oncarrot.com, through the comments section below or go to oncarrot.com and check us out.
On this particular video, we’re going to address one of the most common “problem” questions that we get…
“Why am I not getting the real estate leads online that I want or I’m NOT getting any leads?”
Because in order for you guys to get value out of leveraging the web with your marketing, you got to be getting leads in some way whether it’s phone calls, whether it is people submitting forms, whatever it is. Leads have to be had, otherwise, you are not getting the value out of it.
We boiled it down to just four reasons that you are not getting the number of leads you want. As you are going through this particular strategy sketch, make sure that you are identifying which one or ones of these you need to tap on next.
Okay?
If you are not getting leads you want, you need to be doing one of these things better or more.
Why Your Not Getting Real Estate Leads Online Reason #1: Traffic
The first thing you want to look at is your traffic. That’s the most obvious thing, right? Because you can’t get a lead if you are not getting people to land on your website.
How do we get more people to land on your website?
The first thing we’d like to see is that you are getting at least 25 visitors to your website per month and we are saying at a minimum because on average let’s say it’s a motivated house seller website… you might be converting three, five, six, seven, eight percent,10% if you are doing really well, into a lead.
If you are converting at 10%, which is a really high conversion rate in this type of market, you are only going to be getting about two to two and a half leads per month. Now that is not a lot of leads so that is your issue.
If you are getting less than 25 people to your website a month, then that’s probably the first thing you need to focus on.
If you are getting 50, 60, 70, people to your website a month and you are still not getting very many leads, let’s say it’s converting at less than 1%, we are going to move on to the next thing.
Why Your Not Getting Real Estate Leads Online Reason #2: Quality of Traffic
The next thing is the quality of your traffic. First off, if you have traffic coming in and you are getting 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 people to your website a month but you are still not getting very many leads, you are getting less than 5% or less than 3% of them becoming a lead, it could be a quality issue.
You need to ask yourself some questions. It could be, where are these people coming from? Are they coming from good marketing channels? What is the message that you are delivering to them to get them to your website?
Often times we’ll see people using Google pay-per-click or Facebook ads or something and they are getting a lot of traffic from Facebook for motivated house sellers but the problem is, those people are not very targeted. So you don’t want to be driving motivated house sellers from a random Facebook campaign to websites and expect to really have a conversion rate.
The quality of those visitors is going to be lower. The quality of the Craigslist visitors will be probably a little bit lower, the quality of an SEO lead is going to be way higher. If you are not getting very many leads but you have a lot of traffic, see where your traffic is coming from. Is it coming from a high-quality source where they are very targeted and you can help them specifically? What message do they see before they land on your website?
Did your ads say, “Sell your house.”? Then your website now says, “Sell your houses quickly, we buy houses.”. They are just looking for a real estate agent and you are offering a completely different service. Look and see what your ads and your message says.
If you got the traffic nailed, the quality is perfect and that’s nailed, and you got a lot of traffic coming in and you are still not getting the leads you are looking for, what do we look at next? We look at performance next.
If you would like for your website to convert more leads, then this webinar replay might be for you. It is a long call but packed full of valuable information. Give the webinar a view and then download our 16-point real estate investor conversion checklist.
Why Your Not Getting Real Estate Leads Reason #3: Website Performance
We talk a lot about performance here at InvestorCarrot where performance is one of the things we specialize in.
It’s helping your websites perform at a higher level which means convert more of your visitors, more of your quality traffic into a lead. The performance side is your website. Have you gone through some tutorials on this website? Have you gone through our other whiteboard strategy sketches to see how you need to structure your forms? Have you gone through some of our mastermind calls, things like that? Make sure your website is built to be high performing.
If you are a Carrot member already, you got this one nailed. You don’t have to do anything there unless you jerked up the design that we have given you. Make sure you are sticking with the design, then just personalize it with your own content, tweaks, you personalize it with your branding and credibility.
If you are not a Carrot member, make sure you are really focusing on the design of your website so it’s performing at a high level and like I said we have a lot of resources you can check out. Go to oncarrot.com/resources and we have an entire video and an entire checklist on how to create a high performing website.
If you’ve got your high performing website set up, you got quality traffic coming into it, and you’re still not getting enough leads, what we want to do is look into credibility.
Why Your Not Getting Real Estate Leads Online Reason #4: Credibility
You can have the best website in the world that is set up with all the cool things to get someone to convert into a lead, but maybe you haven’t built credibility on the website. Maybe people aren’t believing that you can truly help them.
Maybe you’re not really building that connection with them enough to where they are like, “Man, these people seem like real people and I want to work with them.” You need to nail the credibility.
What do you do to really build great credibility for any business?
It could be business selling microphones or a business selling whatever it is. You need to be building credibility and you do it the same way. You have a really good about page.
We found in our data, the number three most visited page, sometimes the number two most popular page across all of our thousands of InvestorCarrot members websites including our own sales websites is always the about page because people are looking to prove or disprove the preconceptions in their mind on why they should or should not work with you.
If they go to your about page and it’s basic, it’s generic, it doesn’t have anything about you, they aren’t building that connection with you. They are probably going to bounce out of there and possibly go and look at your competitors. The ones that they connect with more, are going to be the ones they choose to work with.
Make sure your about page has a little bit about you. Kind of tells about why you want to help people, your mission, and list maybe some of your team members in there. Don’t be afraid to put your face on the website because your face is going to have to go in front of your client eventually.
Number two is social proof.
Do you have things on your website that show that other people have worked with you before them that you helped that have been in similar situations?
It could be a testimonial, it could be videos, it could be case studies on deals you have worked with, it could be people who you’ve sold properties to who have gotten great returns now and they had a better experience working with you. It could also be the Better Business Bureau badge.
Things like that help to build social proof, reviews on your Facebook channel, things like that. You just want to show other people have worked with you in the past or attest to your character, that you are the type of person that they would want to work with.
The last thing is clear and honest branding.
We found so many websites that nail the about page, nail the social proof, they got the traffic coming in but their logo up top looks like it’s been made in Microsoft Paint in 1998. It’s pixelated. The words are hard to see, and the very first things we often times look at on a website is the upper left of that website which happens to be where logos often times are or at least the top of the website.
So make sure you have very clear honest branding.
I didn’t say you have to have a fancy logo, that’s a completely different thing. Some of the best websites that we have found that generate the most leads, had the simplest logos out there. They didn’t spend a bunch of money on them.
Reasons You’re Not Getting Real Estate Leads Online
If you nail these four things; nail your traffic, the traffic is high quality coming from great sources with a very clear and defined message that matches your website, the website is set up for performance and not just a couple of things but set up everywhere on every single page to perform at a high level, follow what we do and model it.
Don’t copy what we do, but follow and model what we do or if you are a Carrot member that’s already been done for you.
On the credibility side, have a great about page. Look at our about page and see how much you connect with us. We have our core values that we tell about our start-up story, we tell about our team, and you get a chance to connect with us at a better level. It becomes real people then, and it’s easier to work with people than work with a kind of an ominous company.
Get your social proof nailed, get clear on honest branding and if you still don’t have a stream of leads coming in from there, I would highly suggest then you go back up to number one and ramp up your traffic using other methods.
Go out there and get your leads flowing upwards, get your leads flowing in and make them consistent and predictable so your business can grow.
That is why we are all doing this so we can have a consistent, predictable business that really fuels our lifestyle and helps a lot of people.
If you are not on our YouTube channel, but you are on our website, subscribe to our blog or check out the webinar that we have going and you can probably find someone inside or on the website somewhere and see how we can help you grow your leads and leverage the web better.
“If you know your market well and if you know who you’re talking to and know your customer, then you’ll know exactly what to say to get them to at least hear you out and read what you have to say. Then the only people that you hear back from are the people who are the most interested. So it saves you all of this time.” – Ben Settle
“A copywriter should have an understanding of people, an insight into them, a sympathy toward them.” – George Gribbin
The message you deliver in your marketing can make or break how well it works. Your direct mail, website, ads, you name it… copywriting is THE single most valuable skill you can learn to make your marketing more effective.
So Trevor invited on his good friend and world-renowned copywriter Ben Settle (the king of email copywriting) to talk about how you can connect with your audience better in real estate and boost your marketing with better copy.
In this CarrotCast conversation with Ben Settle we cover these six topics;
The most effective types of copywriting.
How to intentionally craft copy around emotions and situations.
Effective copywriting tips for real estate.
How to copywrite for direct mail.
Crafting testimonials into stories.
Key copywriting resources he uses.
Watch the Video Version
3:55 – What is copywriting? Salesmanship in print or other media outlets. 5:25 – Backstory of getting into copywriting. 9:15 – Ben’s first copywriting assignment. 10:00 – What types of copywriting crack through and actually work. 12:35 – Importance of really understanding your prospects. 16:15 – Basic needs that make us tick and intentionally crafting copy around insecurities, problems, and frustrations. 26:50 – Some of the best techniques to join a conversion when writing copy. Building a vision before pitching an offer. 31:30 –Examples of Real estate investor copywriting. 40:45 – Copywriting for direct mail. Focus on the top one or two important messaging tactics. 48:45 – How to leverage your case studies and stories. 51:30 – Cutting through the marketing clutter. Stand out from the pack by telling a story. 54:10 – Crafting copywriting using testimonials. 57:40 – Resources available to better learn about your client. 59:55 –Formulas for copywriting and learn a copywriting slacker secret.
What if you could know that for every $1500 invested in online ads, you’re pulling $10,000 back? But, a lot of investors don’t take the time to calculate and understand what it takes to get a positive ROI. So, they quit too soon. Let’s fix that.
Before we dive in, as you listen to this Strategy Sketch, you’ll need to use The Carrot ROI Calculator tool to help pencil in your own marketing budget.
I’ve got a quick story for you, but before I start if this is your very first strategy sketch with Carrot we have a lot of other ones on our YouTube channel. Check them out after you watch this one.
The story is of 2 different real estate investors…
One real estate investor’s had an amazing return on their marketing.
The other one struggled and lost all their money and ended up giving up.
I want to make sure that you identify where in this story you fit. Which one of these are you resonating with? Which one of these are you living right now?
The First Investor…
The first investor had a marketing budget and he knew his numbers really well. I’m going to be walking through exactly what the first investor did to make sure he got a great ROI on his marketing.
The Second Investor…
The second real estate investor also had a budget. He dove in, he started spending money, he started investing money, but he did not do these 4 steps I’m going to walk you through.
They both had the same amount of money to start, they both had the same amount of experience. One of them lost his butt on all of his marketing, the other ended up making tens of thousands of dollars.
Now, this is not a false story. I was on one of our Coaching Calls recently here at Carrot and these 2 investors were on the exact same call. One of them ended up blowing $1500 on pay-per-click marketing. The other one ended up making almost $9,000 in the first deal because he followed these 4 steps.
If you want to know the difference between really active and really profitable investors, these 4 things are going to be that.
Let’s go ahead and dive in.
Step 1: Your “APD” – What Is Your Average Profit Per Deal?
The first thing, how you get a great return on investment from your paid marketing? That’s what we’re talking about here is your paid marketing. A lot of this will translate over into the stuff where you’re just working kind of sweat equity for your marketing.
Could be you doing your own SEO, could be you out there doing your own door knocking or whatever the heck it is, but we’re talking about marketing that you actually take your money and invest it into the marketing. It could be direct mail, pay-per-click, SEO, you name it.
The first thing here is you’vegot to know your numbers, and I think a lot of people think that they know their numbers. They think, “I make about x amount per deal, I’ve got this much in my budget, and I’m just going to roll with that and we’ll see what happens.”
You probably don’t know your numbers as well as you should but I’m going to walk you through in this video how you should know your numbers in a quick 30-second work your way backward formula.
The numbers that you really need to know about your marketing: You need to know how much money you’re going to be making on each sale.
If you’re a real estate agent, you need to know what your average profit per listing is. If you’re a real estate investor, you need to know what your average profit per deal is.
If you’re not investing yet, go out there and investigate the market, talk to other investors in your market, and find out what their average profit per deal is. Write that down right now.
That’s going to be a key number for you.
Step 2: Your “LPD” and Website Conversion Rate – How Many Leads Before You Close A Deal On Average?
The next thing that you’re going to need to know is what your conversion rate is. You’re going to need to know basically how many leads it takes to turn into a deal for you. You’re going to need to know all those types of things. We’re going to walk you through them here in a second.
If you don’t know how many leads it takes for you to turn it into a deal, it’s going to be really hard to know your numbers and know how much you need to invest in your market.
We’re going to work backward on some numbers and we’re going to help you identify your exact marketing budget so you know exactly what you need to invest with no guessing, take all the emotion out of it so you can just really focus on doing what you need to do. Invest in your marketing very intentionally and not stopping before you need to.
Step 3: Don’t Stop Too Soon
Third is exactly what I’ve led into.Don’t stop too soon. This is one of the biggest mistakes we see, not just for real estate investors or agents, 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 was. We throw up our arms and we move to something else again, and if you’re in that pattern right now.
If you’re in the pattern of going and investing a little bit, dabbling, pulling back because you didn’t get the results you wanted, then you shift focus and you do the same thing, you’re probably going to be in that pattern forever until you change your thought process.
If you’re in that pattern you’re going to be looking back in a year or two years or three years or even a month 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, I don’t have the freedom that I wanted, that I thought that I would have in my business,” and you’re going to blame it on everything but your marketing mindset.
Having the right marketing mindset can save you from that.
Step 4: Trust Your Numbers
The fourth thing is you got to trust your numbers. You cannot go off of emotion in marketing. Marketing is an emotionless entity. You get emotion completely out of marketing unless you’re making your marketing materials. That’s a whole different video, a whole different strategy sketch where and how you use emotion in your marketing materials to really connect with your prospects. You can use emotion there. We don’t want to use emotion in how you analyze whether your marketing’s working or not.
I read this book called Acres of Diamonds and this book basically is a very similar tale to the guys back in the gold rush in California, where there were many stories of these gold miners who would go in and they’d invest a ton of money in buying the equipment and people and digging and digging, and they get a little bit of gold but they did not hit the thread of gold that they thought they were going to hit.
There was this one particular story, I don’t remember the gentleman’s name, but basically this guy built this big gold mine and he dug and dug and one day ran out of money and said, “You know what? I’m just going to quit because this must not be the spot.”
What ended up happening was he ended up moving away, another miner came in and said, “You know what, this looks like it has promise. Let me dig a little bit further.” Within weeks this guy hit this massive payload of gold, 2-3 feet below where the other miner stopped, and the moral to the story there is you need to follow your numbers, not the emotion.
If that first miner knew that gold was in there, he needed to make sure he knew how much budget he had, make sure he knew exactly what the ROI could be on the other end, and not stop until he hit those metrics.
It ended up costing him millions and millions of dollars.
How To Map Out Your Numbers
What we’re going to do is we’re going to walk through a real example here, we’re going to map out your numbers, and we’re going to take it so your marketing turns from the red negative to the green positive. This point right here, this is what we call the inflection point in your marketing.
Almost every time, you’re always going to have this ramp-up period. You’re going to have a period where it’s not giving you much of an ROI. With pay-per-click marketing, it’s going to take some time to get that optimized so your ROI, your return on investment, is where you want it to be.
With search engine optimization, you’re going to be investing a lot of time and money if you’re hiring someone else to do it for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 months before you hit the inflection point and your rankings go up in Google and you start to get those leads and deals.
We have to be long term focused. We cannot be short-term focused on our marketing, and we need to really be shooting for that inflection point, your break-even point, then from there, your profits start to really skyrocket.
What we’re going to do is we’re going to work some numbers here. We’re going to work backward. And, we’re going to make sure you don’t stop too soon because now you’re going to know your numbers. That will help you so you trust your numbers and get emotion out of it.
Working The Numbers…
Let’s start. If you’re a real estate investor let’s just work with wholesalers. What is your average profit per deal? Let’s assume that your average profit per deal is $10,000 in your market. So, we know that if you do a deal, you make $10,000. Now let’s work backward. How many leads does it usually take for you to close that one deal?
The average for Carrot members, for online leads that are generated through our platform, is about 10-15 leads per deal right now.
If you’re doing direct mail it’s about 20-40 leads per deal. If you’re doing pay-per-click it’s probably 15-30 leads per deal. We’re just going to run with 15 leads per deal for this example.
Working backward, we know that we need to get 15 leads so we can get $10,000.
If you’re doing pay-per-click marketing and you already have a campaign going and optimized, how much is it costing you to get a visitor to your website and how is your website converting?
If you’re in a really hot market like a south Florida or LA or Portland, Oregon, websites, in general, are going to be converting lower than websites in a moderate market. If you’re in Birmingham or Louisville or something like that, your website for motivated sellers is going to convert higher than a hot market.
So, don’t look at your friend in Kansas if you’re in LA and go, “Oh my gosh, my buddy’s getting a 10% conversion rate on his seller site, I’m only getting 3. What’s going on?” It’s probably your market, not your website if your website is set up the way that we teach.
Now let’s work with a conversion rate. We’re going to do a 10% conversion rate. It takes 15 leads to close a deal, and then you’ve got your $10,000 profit. To get 15 leads, we’re going to need to get 150 visitors to our website. Your only goal now is how do I get 150 qualified people to my website? 150 people equal $10,000 to me.
Let’s say you’re doing Google pay-per-click or something like that and you’re getting 150 visitors, costing you $2 a click. On average that’s going to be $300. Once again in this hypothetical situation, you need to having a marketing budget of at minimum $300. If you’re in a market where it’s going to be a lot more than $2 a click, say it’s $10-15 a click like a lot of markets are, you need to start adding those numbers up.
Let’s say it’s $10 a click. Now that’s a $1,500 budget. $1,500 in order to get 15 leads, in order to get your $10,000 profit. Now the numbers are really starting to make sense, so those of you who are giving up after you put in $500 in your pay-per-click marketing, you need to be stretching all the way to your max budget. Give yourself a chance to let your numbers work for you.
I think everyone watching this video will easily trade $1,500 for $10,000. If you won’t … please examine yourself because you need to be working the numbers like this.
You cannot be going, “Okay, I want to invest $300 to get $20,000.” You need to be really thinking about those numbers in a big way because if you’re not, your competition is. If you’re in a market where you’re only willing to invest $400 to get a $10,000 deal but your competition is willing to invest $3,000, you’re going to get crushed every time in pay-per-click, every time in Craigslist, every time in SEO, every time in direct mail.
You’re always going to get crushed because your competition knows their numbers. They’re going to take it up to their max budget, and they still know if they’re going to be able to profit.
That is how you scale up your marketing. Know your numbers, remove emotion from it.
1. Find out your average profit per deal first.
2. Find out how many leads it takes you to close a deal,
3. figure out your conversion rate on your website- which we can help you. If you’re an InvestorCarrot member we’ll help you with that. Just let us know and we’ll spin up a split test on your site to find out your conversion rate.
4. Figure out how much it’s going to cost you to get those visitors to your site. Whether it’s through SEO or direct mail or pay-per-click. Figure out what that’s going to cost you to get your 150 visitors to the site using these numbers.
Ramp Up Your Paid Marketing ROI
Get out a piece of paper, figure out those numbers for yourself, get those calculations going, and get your return on investment ramped up for your business. Remove emotion from your marketing, go with your numbers, and work backward down the line.
Sooner than you know it, you’re going to turn from dabbling to crushing it. And, it’s just going to keep on skyrocketing and going up.
Thank you guys and gals for watching this strategy sketch. Make sure to check out other strategy sketches on our YouTube channel. Go over there, we have lots of great strategy sketches where we answer questions that you guys send in each and every week. Thank you guys and gals, we’ll talk soon.
We are really excited to announce our newest set of features. Carrot members have already messaged us and let us know how much they love these new features and how they are making their lives and running their businesses easier.
Today, we want to officially share with you all of the hard work our team has been doing behind the scenes and show you how you can get the most out of these new Carrot features.
As you’ve seen, we’ve been on a roll in 2016 with the new innovations and features we’ve been rolling out to help make your life easier and more profitable.
So with that… let’s talk about the Carrot Lead Manager.
Round 1 Of Our Lead Manager Enhancements
In the past, we’ve focused heavily on what happens before someone becomes a lead. The SEO tools and strategy, the performance and conversion rate, content marketing tools… you know the gig. But we honestly haven’t changed the way you view your leads a whole lot.
Yes, we integrate with lots of CRM and email marketing systems but we wanted to make your lead management experience much better, easier, and more effective within your Carrot account.
No longer do your leads just show up in one big ol’ list of leads.
You can now view all of your site’s leads in our new Lead Dashboard.
Just visit your account and click on the “Leads” option in your dashboard.
The New Leads View On Your Websites
The New Lead Manager… now view your leads in one place with easy filtering by form (other filtering and lead stages coming soon!). Also quickly see the most important info on your leads in seconds.
This First Enhancement (of many to come) Of The Leads Manager Helps You…
See all of your leads in one place
Filter by form quickly and easily
Indicate by color whether you’ve already looked at the lead or not
Quickly see the most important info on your leads
More easily use your cell phone or mobile device to check out your leads (fully mobile responsive)
More Information In Less Time
Using Zillow’s data, we are able to show you useful information about the lead’s property right inside your Carrot dashboard.
This helps you quickly see if the lead is a hot lead, questions to follow up on while you are on the phone, or a great way to see the house details without having to go out to Zillow to search for it.
I Like the New Lead format. (Specifically) I like attaching to Zillow. I can get a quicker idea where the house is on the map. Plus I can see comparable recent sales all within a minute of getting a text message.
Eugene Hoffman
Here is what it looks like when a lead gives you a properly formatted address (if you are getting incomplete addresses check out this post).
New Google Streetview + Maps + Zillow Data For Your Seller Leads
The last update to this new feature is the ability to leave notes on the lead. You can easily have a VA leave notes or drop yourself a helpful reminder of a follow-up action to be taking on the lead information.
Ever Wonder What Marketing Is Actually Producing Your Leads? Introducing Campaigns…
This alone separates top-level investors and beginners, ROI tracking and ROI knowledge.
It’s simple… your business cannot scale if you don’t know how much you should spend per lead. We made a helpful tool for you to find how much you should be spending per deal.
Hands down the hardest part of knowing your ROI is tracking.
Until now…
Carrot’s Campaign Tracking Tool
We kept hearing top-level investors complaining that tracking their marketing was difficult. We totally understand because we have a lot of tracking in place as well.
We took our knowledge of campaign tracking and with the help of our development team launched a simple interface in your dashboard that lets you track any campaign.
Now You Can Create Unique Tracking Links For Your Online Marketing
Carrot’s campaign tracking feature. The official tutorial can be found here.
You can select any piece of content on your Carrot website, tell us where it will be shared, and we will track how many leads come from that link.
You can quickly look at your account and see which pieces of content are performing and which are underperforming.
There is no need to have 3 different apps all tracking your conversion rates and clicks.
A note about campaign limits: Every Carrot member will have access to campaigns. However, Core members will have the ability to launch two campaigns while Content Pro will have up to 15 campaigns. We’re currently working on another plan level that will roll out this fall that will include unlimited tracking links.
Our New Better And More Robust Website Dashboard
Now every Carrot website has it’s own dashboard to help you quickly see what you should do next and your most important stats.
Our development team really knocked it out of the park with this new feature.
Every time you log in to your account you will see
How many visitors have ever come to your site, plus how many in the last week.
How many leads your account has.
Navigation icons to easily get where you want to go in your Carrot account.
A preview of your live site.
A series of action items that we have outlined for you to be the most successful with your online marketing.
Your analytics dashboard, which shows you where your leads are coming from.
Which content you have scheduled for the month.
Your campaign tracking data.
Your New Website Dashboard: Everything In One Place + Action Items
You can now view the most important data right inside your Carrot dashboard.
If You LOVE These New Features, Just Wait Until You See What’s Next
We can’t let the cat out of the bag right now but our team is working behind the scenes to roll out some amazing new features in the coming weeks and months that will help you…
Better manage your SEO campaigns and rankings
More effectively attract leads if you’re a real estate agent
Better and more simply organize your leads into stages and see at a snapshot how many leads are in each stage
… and more!
Keep an eye out in your Carrot accounts for these updates and on this blog for the official releases.
Or, be the next new client to crush it with Carrot’s real estate investor inboard marketing system. The next step to the world’s strongest and simplest real estate platform.
We just launched a NEW feature into Carrot called Instant Address that solves a problem many investors have. Incomplete house addresses. This can be frustrating.
Sometimes a motivated house seller lead gives you their address but it’s not quite what you need to look up the property details.
It turns out there is a simple solution for this. We noticed that not all real estate leads give the most accurate information when requesting a quote for their property. For example, a lead might say they want a quote on their address at 637 Alderwood St., but without the city and state, it can be difficult to know exactly which house is theirs.
We decided it was about time we fixed that, and today we want to show you exactly how we did that, with data to back it up.
Data To The Rescue
We were curious how often incomplete property address information was happening to our members. So, we took a random sample of 500 lead addresses and dumped them into an excel spreadsheet.
We then went through and found how many addresses were given without a properly formatted address.
Surprisingly, 50% of these entries had less than optimal address formatting!
Note: This is not to say that 50% of these addresses were bad or unusable, not in the slightest. Rather they might only require a little more digging to understand them. Also, if a lead was qualified, they probably filled out more info on the step-2. But needless to say, we knew we could make this process better.
How To Get Complete Addresses From Your Leads, The Easy Way
There is no use reinventing the wheel on this one.
You will notice when you go to sites like Zillow or any other major lead generation site, they have that nifty address autocomplete feature. You know the one, you start typing your address and some behind the scenes magic happens. Your address, without you typing in more than a few letters or numbers begins to appear.
We knew this would help both leads and InvestorCarrot members. So… we built it into all Carrot websites.
It is in your account right now. All you need to do is turn it on.
Here is what the feature looks like:
Carrot “Instant Address” On Your Forms…
But we wanted to make sure that this didn’t hurt conversion rates or ruin lead data getting into your account.
We hooked up with a few of our members who were willing to let us test this on their websites.
Here are the aggregate test results.
Uhh, Can You Explain The Increase In Conversion Rates Please?
I know what you are thinking… how did this help conversion rates? Let me just say this, we weren’t testing if this HELPED conversion rates, rather we wanted to make sure it didn’t HURT conversion rates.
The fact that the conversion rate went up may or may not be directly correlated with this test. We would need to do more testing and get a bigger sample before making that claim.
But suffice it to say, that inserting this feature does streamline the process for your house sellers especially on mobile devices… which would likely also improve the performance of your pages + get you more complete addresses in your lead database.
In fact, it likely improves the chances because it’s just too darn easy now.
Think About It
This feature is pretty common these days. Leads are accustomed to seeing it all sorts of different websites.
Autocomplete is especially helpful for those on mobile because, with a few finger taps, they can insert their address.
So What’s The Point Of All This And What Should I Do With This Data?
I am glad you asked.
The ENTIRE point of this is that the feature does the following for you:
Ensures you are getting good property address data
Doesn’t deter a lead from giving you their address (it actually makes it easier for them to give it to you)
It looks great and works like many other lead generation sites
It will still pass data to the step-2 form when configured properly
Time To Jump Into The Weeds
If you are thinking, I would love to turn this on my Carrot forms, AWESOME. Let’s get you hooked up.
Let’s say you use ZoHo or Podio (or one of the other popular CRMs). The biggest thing you need to consider, when setting up this new feature, is how the property form field data is being passed to your CRM.
This means you might have to reconfigure the form field to now point to the correct place in your CRM account.
Before we made the change you were mapping a text field to your ZoHo or Podio account. Now you are mapping a different form field. So login to your CRM and test that the data is getting in there correctly.
Wrapping It All Up
Does this feature rock? You bet it does.
Does it make life easier for your leads and you? You know it.
Our data suggests that this feature can’t hurt your conversion rate.
Does it take a little reconfiguring and set up? Yup, but with anything in life, if it’s too easy it’s not worth it.
I hope the 5 minutes of work it takes to configure this feature doesn’t deter you from setting it up.
The benefits far out weight the 5 minutes of setup time.
Again, just follow the instructions outlined above and if you struggle getting things to work, just reach out to our awesome support team and we will get you fixed right up.
Are you frustrated by website visitors who browse and never contact you? You’re not alone. Turning lookers into motivated sellers requires a website that works as hard as you do.
This guide isn’t your typical SEO or CRO jargon fest. We’re revisiting one of our most popular blog posts and injecting it with fresh strategies. We’ll cover data-driven tactics you can use right now to turn your website into a lead generation machine for motivated sellers.
The CRO-Optimized Homepage Blueprint
Let’s break down the essential elements of a high-converting real estate investor homepage:
Hero Section: A Benefit-Driven Powerhouse for Maximum Conversions
The hero section is your website’s prime real estate, acting as the first impression that grabs visitors and compels them to take action. Here’s a deeper dive into each element, incorporating data-backed reasoning and specific examples:
1. Headline: Craft a Compelling Hook That Speaks Their Language
Data-driven Reason: Studies by Copyblogger show that strong headlines can increase conversion rates by up to 10%.
The Secret Sauce: Focus on benefits, not features. Instead of saying, “We Buy Houses,” a better option is “Sell Your House Fast: Hassle-Free Cash Offer Today.” Speak directly to their pain points (selling a house quickly, avoiding a lengthy process) and highlight the solution you provide (fast cash offer).
Specificity is Key: Get even more specific by targeting a particular niche of motivated sellers. For example, “Need to Sell Your Inherited Property Quickly? We Can Help!”
2. Visual Appeal: Images that Matter
The Power of Local: High-quality, local imagery builds trust and establishes a connection with potential leads. Use photos reflecting your service area or showcasing successful deals you’ve closed.
Data on Visuals: According to our data, including relevant images in your content can increase views by an average of 82%.
Beyond Stock Photos: While professional stock photos can work, consider using genuine images of yourself or your team. This humanizes your brand and fosters trust.
3. Eye-Catching CTA: The Call to Conversion
Color Psychology: Utilize contrasting colors for your CTA button. Studies suggest that red, blue, orange, and green are particularly effective in driving clicks.
Action-Oriented Text: Ditch generic CTAs like “Submit.” Instead, use clear, action-oriented text like “Get Your Free Cash Offer” or “Schedule a No-Obligation Consultation.”
Button Size Matters: Don’t make them miss it! Make your CTA button prominent and large enough for easy tapping on mobile devices.
4. Mobile-First Design: Prioritize the Dominant Viewport
The Mobile Majority: Our Carrot data proves over 60% of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices.
Seamless Shrinking: Ensure your hero section shrinks and adapts seamlessly for mobile viewing. Text should be easy to read, and buttons should be large enough for easy tapping.
Phone Number Visibility: Prioritize phone number visibility in the hero section. Ideally, it should be clickable for one-tap dialing on mobile devices. This removes friction and allows motivated sellers to connect with you instantly.
Bonus Tip: A/B Testing is Your Friend
Don’t settle for assumptions! Utilize A/B testing tools to compare different versions of your hero section elements (headline variations, CTA button colors, etc.). This data-driven approach helps you identify what resonates best with your target audience and maximizes conversions.
Content that Educates and Converts: Building Trust and Inspiring Action
The content beneath your hero section serves a crucial role in nurturing leads and guiding them toward conversion. Here’s how to craft compelling content that educates, builds trust, and ultimately converts visitors into motivated seller leads:
1. Problem-Solution Focus: Speak to Their Needs, Not Just Your Services
Understand Your Audience: Conduct thorough market research and identify the specific challenges faced by motivated sellers in your area. Are they facing financial hardship, a looming relocation, or a complicated inheritance?
Data on Empathy: According to research, ads that use human emotion are 31% more effective than ads that use traditional tactics, which are only 16% effective.
Speak Their Language: Don’t just list your services. Address their pain points directly and use language they understand. For example, instead of saying, “We Offer Fast Cash Closings,” explain how a fast cash closing benefits them: “Get Cash in Your Hand Quickly and Avoid Months of Uncertainty.”
2. Benefit-Oriented Text: Highlight the Value You Deliver
Focus on Outcomes: People are primarily motivated by the benefits they’ll receive. Go beyond simply explaining what you do; showcase how it solves their problems and improves their lives.
Data on Benefits Focus: Studies by MarketingSherpa indicate that benefit-oriented content can generate up to 5x more leads than features-focused content.
Examples: Instead of saying, “We Buy Houses As-Is,” emphasize the benefits: “Avoid Expensive Repairs: We Buy Your House in Any Condition!” Another example: “Skip the Stressful Listing Process: Sell Your House Quickly and Easily with Our Cash Offer.”
3. Social Proof: Leverage the Power of Testimonials and Case Studies
Building Trust: Positive testimonials and case studies act as social proof, demonstrating the value you deliver to past clients. This builds trust with potential leads who are still considering their options.
Data on Social Proof: According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from strangers more than advertising.
Showcase Success Stories: Feature success stories with quotes from satisfied clients. Briefly explain their situation, the challenges they faced, and how your services provided the solution.
Data-Driven Results: When possible, quantify the benefits you delivered. Include details like how quickly a house was sold or the amount of money saved by avoiding repairs.
Remember:
Keep it Concise: People are busy, so keep your content concise and easy to read. Bullet points, subheadings, and visuals can improve readability.
Maintain a Conversational Tone: Write in a friendly and approachable manner, fostering a connection with your audience.
Call to Action: Throughout your content, strategically include CTAs that encourage visitors to take the next step, like contacting you for a free consultation or downloading a valuable guide.
Strategic Navigation & Essential Pages: Guiding Visitors and Building Trust
A well-structured website with straightforward navigation allows visitors to find the information they need quickly and efficiently. Here’s how to create a user-friendly experience that fosters trust and guides them toward conversion:
1. Clear Navigation: A Roadmap for Your Website
User Experience (UX) Focus: A clear and intuitive navigation bar is crucial for a positive user experience. Visitors shouldn’t have to hunt for the information they need.
Data on Navigation: According to Crazy Egg, 40% of visitors will leave a website if they can’t find the information they’re looking for within the first few seconds.
Essential Links: Include a clear navigation bar at the top of every page with easy access to key pages like:
Home: This should always be the first link, allowing visitors to return to the hero section quickly.
About Us: Build trust and connect with visitors by showcasing your expertise and experience.
Services: Clearly explain the services you offer and how they benefit motivated sellers.
FAQs: Address common questions and concerns potential leads might have.
Contact: Provide multiple ways for visitors to get in touch with you, including phone number, email address, and a contact form.
Mega Menus (Optional): For websites with extensive information, consider well-organized mega menus that categorize sub-pages for easy navigation.
2. Compelling “About Us” Page: Unveiling the Human Touch
Building Trust: A well-crafted “About Us” page humanizes your brand and builds trust with potential leads. It allows visitors to connect with you personally and understand your expertise.
Content Elements: Include the following elements on your “About Us” page:
Your Story: Share the story behind your business, your motivations for helping motivated sellers, and what sets you apart.
Team Bios: Showcase your team member’s expertise and experience. Include photos and brief bios highlighting their qualifications.
Testimonials: Integrate positive testimonials from satisfied clients to build trust and social proof.
Awards & Recognition: If you’ve received any industry awards or recognition, highlight them on your “About Us” page to demonstrate credibility.
Bonus Tip: Consider incorporating video content on your “About Us” page. This allows visitors to connect with you on a more personal level and see your passion for helping motivated sellers.
SEO Optimization for Search Visibility: Attract Qualified Leads Organically
In today’s competitive online landscape, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for driving organic traffic to your real estate investor website. By strategically incorporating relevant keywords, you can ensure your website shows up in search results when motivated sellers in your area are looking for solutions.
1. Keyword Research: Uncovering the Language of Your Audience
Understanding Search Intent: Conduct thorough keyword research to identify the specific search terms motivated sellers in your location are using. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Carrot’s Keyword Explorer Tool, and SEMrush can be helpful for this.
Data on Keyword Research: According to a Backlinko study, websites with strong SEO strategies can generate over 1000% more organic traffic than those without.
Target Long-Tail Keywords: Don’t just focus on broad keywords with high competition. Target long-tail keywords that are more specific and have lower competition. For example, instead of targeting “sell my house,” target “sell my inherited house fast in [your city].”
Location Matters: Integrate local SEO keywords throughout your website copy to improve local search ranking. For example, include your city and state in your page titles, meta descriptions, and headers.
2. On-Page Optimization: Weaving Keywords with Care
Strategic Keyword Placement: Once you’ve identified your target keywords, integrate them naturally throughout your website copy. This includes:
Page Titles: Every page should have a unique and keyword-rich page title that accurately reflects the content.
Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are short summaries displayed in search results. Optimize them with relevant keywords to entice users to click on your website.
Headers: Use H1, H2, and H3 headers throughout your content, incorporating your target keywords in a natural and informative way.
Body Copy: While keyword density is important, prioritize natural language and avoid keyword stuffing. Focus on creating valuable and informative content for your audience.
Bonus Tip: Go beyond traditional keyword research. Explore “People Also Ask” (PAA) or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) sections and answer box content on relevant search terms. This allows you to target specific questions motivated sellers might have and position your website as a trusted resource.
By implementing these SEO best practices, you’ll increase your website’s visibility for relevant search queries. This translates to attracting more qualified leads who are actively searching for solutions you can provide. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process. Regularly monitor your website’s performance, analyze keyword rankings, and adjust your strategy as needed.
Conclusion: Cultivating a Conversion Powerhouse
By implementing the data-driven CRO best practices and SEO strategies outlined above, you can transform your real estate investor website from a passive online presence into a powerful lead generation machine. Remember, a successful website is a living entity that requires ongoing optimization and nurturing. Here’s how to ensure your website continues to thrive:
1. Embrace A/B Testing for Continuous Improvement
The Power of Iteration: Don’t settle for assumptions! Utilize A/B testing tools to compare different versions of your website elements. This could include testing variations of your hero section headline, CTA button color, or “About Us” page layout.
Data-Driven Decisions: Track key metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates, and time on page. Analyze A/B test results to identify what resonates best with your target audience and make data-driven decisions for future website improvements.
2. Content Marketing: A Magnet for Motivated Sellers
Become a Trusted Resource: Don’t just focus on selling; establish yourself as a trusted resource in your community.
Data on Content Marketing: According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing generates over 3 times the leads compared to traditional advertising and costs 62% less.
Content Ideas:
Create informative blog posts that address common challenges faced by motivated sellers in your area.
Develop downloadable guides or e-books offering valuable insights on the real estate selling process.
Consider video content, hosting webinars, or creating infographics to diversify your content offerings.
3. Leverage the Power of Online Reviews
Building Trust and Credibility: Positive online reviews from satisfied clients act as social proof and build trust with potential leads.
Data on Reviews: According to BrightLocal, 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Encourage Reviews: Make it easy for satisfied clients to leave positive reviews on platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, and Facebook.
Respond to All Reviews: Take the time to respond to all reviews, both positive and negative. Thank satisfied clients for their feedback and address any concerns raised in negative reviews promptly and professionally.
Incorporating these ongoing strategies will cultivate a website that not only attracts motivated sellers but also fosters trust, establishes you as a valuable resource, and ultimately converts visitors into leads.
Remember, a successful website is a journey, not a destination. By consistently applying these strategies and staying informed about the latest trends, you can ensure your real estate investor website remains a powerful Evergreen lead-generation machine for years to come.
Wholesaling across multiple real estate markets doesn’t require a complex website system but rather a strategic approach where your website serves as a central hub to establish credibility, showcase local expertise, and generate leads in each target area.
Key Takeaways
Create location-specific landing pages for each market you serve with targeted keywords, local imagery, and content that demonstrates your understanding of local market conditions.
Build trust through transparency by including testimonials from each market, clear contact information, and educational resources that establish your expertise as a wholesaler.
Customize your messaging with location-specific calls to action and visual branding elements that resonate with each target market while maintaining consistent overall brand identity.
By implementing these strategic website approaches, you can transform your online presence from a static brochure into a dynamic hub that speaks directly to each market you serve, overcoming the challenges of appearing relevant and trustworthy in multiple locations.
Imagine Sarah, a young and ambitious real estate investor. Starting in her hometown, she quickly mastered the art of wholesaling – finding undervalued properties, securing them under contract, and assigning those contracts to rehab specialists at a profit. Success came quickly, but Sarah craved more. Limited by her local market, she knew she needed to expand her horizons. Undeterred, Sarah took a calculated leap, targeting several neighboring cities with similar demographics. By leveraging a strategic online presence, she built trust with sellers in these new markets, uncovered a wider pool of deals, and ultimately scaled her wholesaling business to new heights.
Wholesaling, the process of acquiring properties under contract and then assigning those contracts to a buyer for a fee, is a powerful strategy for generating profits in the real estate market. While success is certainly achievable by focusing on a single market, venturing into new territories offers several advantages. Diversification across economic climates reduces risk, and a wider pool of deals provides more opportunities to find hidden gems. However, expanding your reach comes with its own set of challenges. Building trust with new sellers and buyers, demonstrating local market knowledge, and appearing relevant in each area all require a strategic approach.
This is where your website steps in as your secret weapon. By crafting a website that speaks directly to each market you serve, you can overcome these hurdles and propel your wholesaling business to new heights. Let’s dive into the specific strategies you need to implement to transform your website from a static brochure into a dynamic hub that fuels your multi-market success.
Watch this video for deeper insights into wholesaling in multiple markets:
Challenges of Wholesaling in Multiple Markets
The potential rewards of expanding your wholesaling business to multiple markets are undeniable. Access to a wider pool of deals, diversification across economic climates, and scaling your profits are all exciting possibilities. However, venturing into new territories also presents unique challenges that require a strategic approach. Here are the key hurdles you’ll need to overcome when marketing yourself as a wholesaler across multiple locations:
Local Knowledge and Market Nuances: Every market has its own rhythm. Understanding local trends, pricing structures, and even legalities specific to each area is crucial for success. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. Without in-depth knowledge of, for example, average renovation costs in a particular market, you risk miscalculating your profit margins or underestimating the rehab potential of a property. This can lead to missed deals or, worse, deals that fall apart during due diligence.
Building Trust with Potential Buyers and Sellers in Different Areas: In the wholesaling game, trust is your currency. Sellers need to feel confident that you can deliver a qualified buyer quickly and at a fair price. Buyers need to know you have access to good deals and the expertise to navigate the closing process. Building this trust takes time and effort, especially when you’re new to a market. Without a proven track record and established relationships with local players, convincing sellers you’re the right partner can be an uphill battle.
Appearing Relevant and Engaged in Each Market: Wholesaling is a competitive business, and potential clients are bombarded with marketing messages. To stand out, you need to demonstrate that you’re not just a fly-by-night operator. In a new market, convincing sellers you’re genuinely interested in their area and not just here for a quick buck requires a different approach. Simply plastering your generic wholesaling website across new territories won’t cut it.
Website as Your Central Hub
The challenges of wholesaling across multiple markets might seem daunting, but fear not! Your website can be the key to overcoming these hurdles and transforming into a central hub for your multi-market wholesaling business. Here’s how:
Conquer Local Knowledge with Targeted Content:
While you can’t be an expert on every market overnight, your website can bridge the gap. Create location-specific landing pages or blog posts dedicated to each market you operate in. These pages can showcase your understanding of the area by highlighting: * Local market trends and data (average sales prices, days on market) * Success stories of past deals you’ve closed in that specific city * Testimonials from satisfied sellers in the area * Information on local resources and programs relevant to wholesalers (investor groups, lenders)
By providing valuable, localized content, you demonstrate a genuine interest in each market and establish yourself as a knowledgeable resource for potential clients.
Build Trust Through Authority and Transparency:
Your website can be a powerful tool for building trust with potential buyers and sellers. Here’s how:
Showcase Your Expertise: Dedicate sections of your website to educating visitors on the wholesaling process and the benefits you offer as a wholesaler. Include clear explanations of what you do, the types of properties you work with, and your typical timeline for closing deals. Consider incorporating videos or case studies to showcase your past successes and expertise. Testimonials and Social Proof:Positive testimonials from satisfied sellers and buyers in each market you serve are gold. Include these prominently on your website, ideally linked to the specific location pages. Social proof builds trust and demonstrates your track record of success in different territories. Transparency is Key: Be upfront about your contact information, service areas, and fees. Having a dedicated “Contact Us” page for each market allows potential clients to easily reach you and fosters a sense of accessibility and local presence.
Appear Relevant and Engaged with Tailored Messaging:
A generic wholesaling website won’t resonate with potential clients in different markets. Here’s how to use your website to appear relevant and engaged:
Location-Specific Calls to Action: Instead of a generic “Contact Us” form, create targeted calls to action on each landing page that speak directly to the needs of that market. For example, “Get Your Free Seller’s Report – ” or “Find Your Cash Buyer in ” will resonate more than a generic “Sell Your House Fast” option. Visual Branding with a Local Touch: Maintain a consistent brand identity across your website but with the flexibility to incorporate subtle visuals that resonate with each target market. This could include using local cityscapes as background images or color palettes that reflect the local aesthetic.
By implementing these strategies, your website transforms from a static brochure into a dynamic hub that speaks directly to each market you serve. This targeted approach builds trust, showcases your expertise, and positions you as a relevant and engaged player in each area you operate.
Website Strategy for Multi-Market Wholesalers
Your website is the cornerstone of your multi-market wholesaling operation. Here’s how to leverage its power to attract sellers and buyers in each of your target areas:
Content Strategy: Speak the Local Language
Location-Specific Landing Pages: Ditch the one-size-fits-all approach. Create dedicated landing pages or blog posts for each market you serve. Titles like “Wholesaling Houses in ” immediately grab attention and demonstrate your local presence.
Targeted Keywords: People searching for wholesaling services use location-specific keywords. Research and incorporate relevant keywords for each market throughout your website content. This improves your search engine ranking in each area, ensuring potential clients easily find you.
SEO Optimization: Don’t underestimate the power of SEO. Optimize each landing page for its specific location by incorporating local keywords naturally into the content, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. Consider exploring local SEO tools to further boost your visibility in each market.
Visual Branding: Consistency with a Local Flair
Maintain a consistent brand identity across your entire website. This builds recognition and trust. However, infuse your website with subtle visual elements that resonate with each target market. Think about incorporating:
Cityscapes or Local Landmarks: Use high-quality images of cityscapes or iconic landmarks in the background of your landing pages for each market. This creates a sense of local connection and demonstrates familiarity with the area.
Color Palettes: Consider using color palettes that reflect the local aesthetic. This could be a vibrant beach scene theme for a coastal market or a more muted, historical theme for a city steeped in tradition. A subtle shift in color scheme can go a long way in creating a sense of local relevance.
Calls to Action: Make it Clear What You Want
Don’t leave visitors guessing about what to do next. Implement clear and targeted calls to action (CTAs) on each landing page. These CTAs should speak directly to the needs of that specific market. For example, instead of a generic “Contact Us” button, use CTAs like:
“Get Your Free Seller’s Report – “ – This provides immediate value and positions you as a resource for motivated sellers.
“Find Your Cash Buyer in “ – This speaks directly to a seller’s pain point and clearly conveys your value proposition.
Lead Capture Forms: Segment Your Audience for Tailored Communication
Utilize separate lead capture forms on each location-specific landing page. This allows you to segment your audience by market, ensuring your communication is relevant and targeted. By capturing location data, you can personalize future emails and marketing messages, building stronger relationships with potential clients in each area.
Additional Tips & Considerations
Conquering the digital landscape is just one piece of the puzzle. Here are some additional strategies to solidify your presence as a multi-market wholesaler:
Social Media Savvy: Don’t underestimate the power of social media platforms for targeted marketing. Create separate social media profiles or pages for each market you serve. Share location-specific content, engage with local groups and influencers, and run targeted social media ad campaigns to reach motivated sellers and potential buyers in each area.
Building Local Relationships: While your website is a powerful tool, there’s no substitute for building relationships with local players. Network with real estate agents, attend local investor meetings, and connect with other wholesalers in each market. These connections can be a valuable source of referrals and provide valuable insights into the local market nuances.
Conclusion: Your Website – The Hub of Your Multi-Market Success
The challenges of wholesaling across multiple markets are real, but you can overcome them with a well-crafted website as your central hub. By implementing the strategies outlined above, you’ll create a website that speaks directly to each market you serve, showcasing your expertise, building trust, and attracting a steady stream of motivated sellers and eager buyers.
Remember, your website is a dynamic tool, not a static brochure. Continuously update it with fresh content, analyze your website traffic for each market, and refine your approach based on the data. You can turn your multi-market wholesaling dream into a thriving reality with dedication and a strategic online presence.
PPC (PayPerClick) marketing is one of the online lead generation strategies we teach our Carrot clients to use to get traffic coming in while you build up your SEO and content marketing.
Why?
Because SEO is a long term game (highly profitable but it takes patience)… while with PPC marketing you can have traffic and leads coming in, in hours or days.
It’s not “one or the other”… it’s a matter of your real estate lead gen goals and which one or ones best fit into your overall time and money budget to reach the prospects that you need to keep growing your business.
Like this chart shows…
PPC Marketing Can Be A Critical Part Of An Overall Lead Generation Effort For Many
With that said, if you know that PPC marketing can be a great tool for you and your real estate investing business, but just don’t have the time to learn it yourself, you need to seriously think about finding an amazing team to do the work for you.
Who specializes in working with real estate investors and all of the intracacies involved.
Who specializes in performance above all else, not just setting up and automating a PPC campaign.
And who delivers amazing customer support that you’re used to as a Carrot client.
So…
We Welcome Our Latest Carrot Certified Partner To Our Community…
We’re excited to announce welcoming in AdwordsNerds to our Carrot Marketplace as our Carrot Certified Partner on the PPC marketing side of things.
So, one of the first things you need to take into consideration before starting out in PPC is to perform a simple review Google search. Start the search by Googling terms such as “AdWords Nerds review” or “reviews of AdWords Nerds”.
It’s important for you to have in mind how different PPC service companies have performed with past clients. Take a look at ratings, management fees, costs per conversions, lead generation, if you will have access to your account.
There are some PPC consultants who might charge $150 to $5000+ per month or charge a flat rate per lead. Adding that optimized real estate PPC specialist is often the more “cost-effective” route than signing with a large agency.
Those investors that try to manage their own AdWords campaigns usually become frustrated at quit. Leaving a bad experience.
The solution: Hire a professional PPC service for real estate investors.
AdWords PPC can be a very complex process. Without the proper guidance and education, one can become confused while wasting a lot of marketing dollars.
With that, Dan at AdWords Nerds stepped up to the plate! AdWords Nerds is a certified InvestorCarrot PPC company and partner. Dan wrote a very detailed PPC guide that explains what things you should know about AdWords before you start advertising and spending money. This guide lays out the things you must know about AdWords before you start using it.
[cta offer=”ppcreport”]
Real estate investors have one of the toughest, weirdest, most complicated AdWords markets in the world.
Dan came into investing after running AdWords campaigns in a dozen different industries. He worked with plumbers and coaches, plastic surgeons and ambulance companies.
Not a single one of them had the sheer level of insanity found when he started digging into the world of online marketing for real estate investors.
Why is that? Well, there’s a few reasons:
High Potential ROI On Real Estate Deals Lends Itself To PPC Marketing
Most businesses are trying to sell moderately-priced products. That places a cap on what can profitably be spent to bring in a new customer. But, real estate investors have more room in their budgets. Net profits can be upwards of $60k in deals. Even novice wholesalers can make over $10k in deals if they’re in a good market.
All that profit means people are willing to spend a lot to get motivated seller leads – and competition can be fierce.
Gathering Good Data On What Actually Works
Over the last year Dan had the opportunity to look at dozens of different Investor AdWords accounts.
He looked at hundreds of thousands of different keywords, ads, and landing pages. He saw bids as high as $150 a click…and as low as ten cents a click.
You know what he found out? There is almost no hard data out there on what actually works. Without good data to fall back on, people share their personal experiences. For example, an investor might share his or her account that’s been really crushing it in their market.
So what happens if you take that account and set it up in your neck of the woods? About 50% of the time, you’ll do great. And the other 50% of the time? Your account turns into a giant, smoking hole in the ground.
That’s because so much of what determines a keyword’s profitability is unique to your market, your business, and your situation.
What CRUSHES it in one market, may absolutely flop in another.
“Picking the right keywords for your real estate AdWords campaigns is what makes the difference between making money and losing money”. Dan Barrett
Know This – PPC Is Not SEO
SEO keywords are pretty well-understood in the real estate investor space – companies like Investor Carrot have put out amazing guides on the topic, and SEO is easier for most investors to understand…after all, we all use Google to search for stuff.
When you move those keywords to Pay Per Click, however, you start to run into problems.
In Pay-Per-Click, we have to worry not just about what keyword we’re using, but how that keyword will be matched up with the search queries we want. And it’s not always obvious.
Introducing! PPC Service For Real Estate Investors.
Fast, Quality Leads Without Lifting a Finger
PPC (PayPerClick) ads are a great way to get traffic to your website right away – without having to wait months for SEO.
For our managed PPC service, you’ll work directly with the only Google Partner Agency that focuses specifically on Real Estate Investors – AdWords Nerds.
Interested in PPC for Real Estate Investors? Find out more about AdWords Nerds and what they have to offer.
At the risk of being obvious … as a real estate investor, your business lives and dies by two things.
Number one, your ability to generate leads. Number two, your ability to close deals.
And one way to increase the amount of online leads you get is to…
… do a lot of testing and make your website convert more visitors into qualified leads.
How a small increase in performance can put tens of thousands in “found” profits in your pocket.
An increase in “conversion rate” on a real estate investing website from 5% to 8% means an extra 3 leads per 100 visitors. If you get 100 qualified visitors per month to your site… that’s an extra 36 motivated seller leads per year (3 x 12). If you close on average a deal per every 15 qualified seller leads and net on average $10k per deal… that’s an extra 2 deals and $20k in profits per year.
Just by doing some testing and improving the performance of your website.
Pretty cool eh? That’s assuming NO extra traffic. Free money.
We spend so much time split testing and optimizing our pages here at Carrot because we know so many people go to the web first to get information about buying or selling their house.
In fact, a whopping 43% of home buyers start their purchase process online compared to the second-place first step — contacting an agent — at 15%.
In other words, if you want to meet leads where they are, fill your sales funnel, and start converting like crazy … hands down the best way to do that is online.
A New Page Design We Tested That Yielded Up To 38.54% More Leads
See how and why this page design increased lead flow on some sites up to 38% more…
This post is going to go into a lot of the methodology and “backstory” on how to create a real estate investing or agent page that performs at a high rate. One that converts more visitors into leads than your current website may (for sure your competitors) and one that squeezes out an extra margin of leads and deals without you increasing your traffic (assuming you are getting solid traffic right now).
Below we’ll actually give you the “Stacked Hero” landing page and if you’re not a Carrot member you can even download the raw HTML files to upload and use yourself online. If you are a Carrot member, great! As of our last update, you now have this design available to launch NEW websites within your Carrot account in under 10 seconds with no tech hassle. We like to make your life easy :-)
To do that, I’ll share how our “Stacked Hero” design converted 38.54% more real estate leads than our best performing previous design. Even better — after guiding you through a handful of optimization principles — I’ll share how you can implement the very same template in your own business.
Let’s dive into the story of why this page design performs so well and the marketing principles that cause most real estate investor websites to perform so bad.
And if you’re NOT yet a Carrot member, download the HTML files of this landing page at the bottom of this page for FREE. Carrot members, this design is now in your account and you can launch a new site with it in under 10 seconds.
Real Estate Lead Generation Today: Thou Shall Test … or Die
This means we’re constantly testing and improving elements on our client’s websites to improve their results.
For the last year we’ve had a mission: to create a lead generating page that could beat our highest performing control.
This meant running tests across a select number of current Carrot websites throughout the country; ones that were getting a good amount of traffic and already converting leads. In fact, we ran 7 months’ worth of tests and dozens of page variations to tens of thousands of motivated house sellers and buyers.
This sort of real-world optimization gives us both a baseline to work from as well as data-driven insights most real estate agents simply can’t generate on their own.
Our testing software informs us when we have a clear winning test variation. You can see below what one of those looks like:
Our testing software lets us know when we have a winning test variation
Before jumping into the details of our tests themselves, let’s start with some of the guiding principles of online lead generation.
Online Real Estate Lead Generation Principles
To keep things as clear as possible, three principles are essential to your online lead generation: (1) your goal, (2) your content, and (3) your form.
1. Your Goal
By far, the biggest mistake you can make on a lead generating page — regardless of the industry — is complication.
Simplicity isn’t just essential to online lead generation. It should be the cornerstone of all your marketing, period.
Why?
Because as Harvard Business Review reports — after reviewing data from “multiple surveys of more than 7,000 consumers” as well as “interviews with hundreds of marketing executives and other experts around the world”:
The single biggest driver of stickiness [that is, a lead or customer’s likelihood to follow through on an intended purchase, buy the product repeatedly, and recommend it to others] was “decision simplicity.”
What consumers want from marketers is, simply, simplicity.
The first step to simplicity is knowing exactly what you want to achieve for each and every piece of customer-facing content you create.
Whether you’re working on a home page, landing page, email campaign, pay-per-click advertising, or even just a physical mailer … you have to begin and end with “a single, all-consuming question: ‘What is your goal … the one, smallest, easiest thing you want your reader to do?’”
As KlientBoost recently put it in their Landing Page Optimization Guide: Find Heaven By Saving Your Visitors From Hell:
Start with your ultimate goal and then … work backwards.
In other words, to increase conversions, your pages need to be ruthlessly free of clutter. Anything that doesn’t move a visitor closer to the one action you want them to take … must be eliminated.
Don’t feel [like] you have to fill all the empty or “white” space on your site with extra icons, or images. Avoid fancy animations and drop down menus. These are more likely to distract users from your content, rather than attracting them to it. Keep the look clean and uncluttered.
This warning comes with good reason.
For example, take a look at the following home page for Fisher Nicholson Realty. Notice that there are no less than 22 possible actions a visitor can take (and that doesn’t even include the dropdown menus that appear if you hover over the navigational bar nor the additional 19 options in the footer):
Way Too Much Distraction And Choices At The Top Of This Site
All told, there are a whopping 68 links, buttons, navigational options, and calls-to-action on that one page alone.
Compare that quagmire with our own homepage. Excluding the header and footer, only four clickable buttons exist:
Even better, three of those four buttons send visitors directly to our Pricing and Plans page.
If you’re designing a landing page … things need to be even simpler.
The golden rule is just one call to action.
That doesn’t mean you can only have one button, but it does mean every button you have should guide visitors toward the same, singular something.
Going back to our first bad example — Fisher Nicholson Realty — clicking through to the “Buyers/Sellers” page you find this:
While the page opens with a call to action — “Buying or Selling? Please make Fisher Nicholson ‘The Home Team’ your Real Estate Company of Choice.” — the only clickable links are to non-related sites, property comparisons, search options, or featured properties.
Tragically, even if a visitor wanted to give them their contact information to “make” Fisher Nicholson their “Real Estate Company of Choice,” there’s literally no place to submit their contact information on the page itself.
Visitors can only take one of two actions: either “Show Me The Deals!” or to call you on the phone.
Technically speaking, the website design we used for our Hero Stacked test is not a landing page; it’s a home page that plays the best of both worlds…
… landing page but engages those not quite ready to convert with great content and credibility. This “mini-site” format actually turns into more leads than squeeze pages according to our vast testing over the years.
But the focus is still on getting email signups for lead generation. So while landing pages should eliminate all distractions, a home page will still need to have navigational links and other clickable areas and all focus on ONE CORE call to action.
However, the same principle applies: the above-the-fold area of any home page should be uncluttered, simplified, and targeted.
Does The Main Call To Action Jump Out Or Do You Have To Hunt For It?
The most notorious place for clutter is the home page. Given the diversity of audience your home page gets, the desire to give them plenty of “what if” options is natural.
Resist that temptation.
In test after test after test, the principle of simplicity — that less truly is more — has proved itself.
2. Your Content
Naturally, given how central simplicity is to your real estate lead generation process, all the content on a page should exist to support the one goal you want your visitor to take: to sign up.
This means placing the most important information — especially your page’s copy — at the top of the page in the hero section. When a visitor lands on your website, you’ve only got a matter of seconds to capture their attention.
If you make it too difficult for your visitor to figure out how you can help them, there are plenty other websites who will be easy to understand … and compelling.
A compelling headline must hit your visitor above all with value.
Your headline can address a pain-point the visitor needs answers for or instill a positive emotional reaction … but either way, it has to touch the heart.
Having all said that, you don’t need to load all the benefits in the main attention-grabbing section, like this personal training website has done:
Too Many Conflicting “Benefits” Crammed Into The Top…
Limit what you want to say in this most important part of your website
Geek Estate Blog highlights just how bad trying to pack an exhaustive list of benefits can be by using a landing page for townhomes in Bothell as a test case. This is how it reads:
You may not be able to see it properly, but the example above is a website about weight loss. Unfortunately, all the images are useless because they don’t support the page’s goal. After all, what’s the point of a car photo on a weight loss website?
On a homepage or landing page, the chief piece of visual content is called a “hero image.”
Adding an oversized “hero” image is incredibly popular. This stems from a hero image’s ability to add appeal, relevance, and what we might even call “sexiness” to a page.
The right hero image can also have a massive impact on overall conversions.
Have a look at this test from French snowboarding ecommerce site Salomon:
The original design on this landing page does not include an oversized hero image
Crazyegg reports that the version with the oversized hero image, as well as a few other tweaks, increased sales from French shoppers by 39.8% and sales by global shoppers by 29.7%, both at a 99.9% confidence rate.
If you add an oversized hero image, bear these four points in mind:
Make sure the photo is responsive so that it behaves when the page is viewed with mobile devices.
Avoid stock photos which can put people off and can lose credibility on your site. Use “real” people or high-quality original product image.
Keeping the form short ‘n sweet also makes it easier for mobile users to complete it, and this is important because there are now more mobile than desktop users on the Internet.
Not to kick Fisher Nicholson Realty while they’re down, but here’s what their contact form looks like on desktop:
Too Many Form Fields Reduces Performance In A Big Way…
There are a total of 19 forms fields … only four of which are required.
On mobile, the form itself is virtually illegible:
Even more detrimental, there is absolutely zero incentive for a visitor to submit their contact information.
The “Send Request” button promises no pay offs, offers no benefits, and it isn’t even an enticingly worded action. Afterall, who wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves, “Gosh, I can’t wait to ‘send a request’ today”?
Be sure not to neglect this part of your form: “What will the visitor get?”
Inman provides a host of ideas for creating compelling and click-worthy real-estate lead magnets: “a lead magnet is an irresistible bribe offering a particular chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information.” The list includes:
Home sellers’ guides.
Relocation packets.
Neighborhood market reports. New listing email registrations.
Property comparative market analyses.
“How-to” e-books or videos — how to stage a home, how to increase curb appeal, how to buy foreclosures, and so on.
Reports — neighborhood, school, crime and more.
Lists — bank-owned properties, short-sale homes, 203(k)-eligible properties, etc.
Real estate-related e-books or videos — landscaping, remodeling, investment opportunities, flipping a house, and so on.
Making forms convert is a complex business, because what works for one site may not work for another. The truth is that you have to keep testing and checking the data to see what’s working for your target audience or not.
To drive this home, Michael Aagaard presents two seemingly contradictory button-copy tests on Content Verve. In the first, adding “Get the Best Daily Tips” increased conversions by 31.54%. In the second, adding “Start Making Better Deals” decreased conversion by 12.45%:
49% More Leads Because Of The Words On Your Buttons…
Knowing this is precisely why we test so relentlessly at InvestorCarrot.
Lastly, when it comes to your forms … does size matter?
Yes.
Large forms get more signups, maybe because they’re so “in-your-face.” Our own tests have shown that having a large form in the middle of the page that contrasts the surrounding elements can help improve conversions substantially.
All those form tips can be a lot to take in. So here’s a quick rundown of best practices from our own extensive testing:
Keep the form fields short
Have the call to action button take up the entire width of the form
Include value-driven language in your call to action button itself
Make the information around the form draw the reader down the page
A Template to Get 38.54% More Online Real Estate Leads …
Enough about principles and best practices.
What you really want is a proven template you can use to get more online leads.
Here’s exactly how we built one that does just that.
Test #1: Three Columns (this test failed)
We started with our high-performing lead-generation page, which already included a number of optimization wins we’d learned from previous tests.
For instance, one the rules we’ve proved to our clients over and over again is that changing the words on the call to action button from a “descriptor” (“Click to Continue” or “Submit”) to a “mental commitment” increase conversions. Here’s just one example:
The Variation on the right — “Get My Fair Cash Offer” — showed an improvement in 49.5% at a 12.55% conversion rate compared to the first — “Click Here to Continue.”
To put a bit of context around that, out of every 100 visitors who land on your website, using the “mental commitment” language would produce 12.5 leads rather than 8.3.
That might not sound like a huge deal. But even if your site only gets 1,000 visitors a month, that translates into 40 additional motivated seller leads.
Even if you close 1 out of every 20 leads (which is a low percentage for many of our customers) and only net on average $7.5k (which, again, is much lower than many of our customers average):
That’s $15,000 in extra revenue every month all without having to generate any additional traffic to your website.
Still, we knew we could do better.
So, we took that page as our control and began by testing a three-column layout with no sidebar to limit the amount of links on a page. The idea was to make it simpler for a user to consume the page’s information:
Version #1 Of This Test – 3 Column Layout
Unfortunately, our first test was not a success.
The results were less than spectacular, but we learned a lot
It actually reduced the performance on the page.
As a result, we decided to get more intentional and focus on the main element a user sees when they first land on a home page: the hero section.
Test #2: The Stacked Hero (this test was a huge success)
Our first priority was to zero in on the page’s goal.
As you can see, the information in the last column on the right is unnecessary. It’s about the real estate agency themselves and adds no value to the visitor. Instead of moving them closer to signing up, it only distracts:
The 3rd column on the right is not necessary in this all important above-the-fold section
This time we predicted — i.e., our hypothesis was — that adding better imagery and a larger form focus the core message of the page.
The second test, then, was all about improving the conversion rate of the site’s home page hero section. This section is incredibly important because a lot of traffic passes through this page, and this is the first thing a lead sees.
Not only that, but research proves that the attention span of people has become so short that your website has a few seconds to grab attention before the visitor clicks away.
The following test page ran for a month across 15 InvestorCarrot websites and received over 1,600 visitors:
Version #2 – The “Stacked Hero” (38% more leads)
Pay special attention to the differences between the two pages:
Control
Three columns
Light Hero image
Three headlines
Narrow form fields and button
Headline:
“Need to Sell Your House Fast?”
Includes phone number
Six lines of text below
Headline:
No location in the headline
Variation
One Column
Dark hero image
One headline
Page-wide form fields and button
Headline:
“Sell Your House Fast in Portland. Get a Guaranteed Fair All-cash Offer.”
Excludes phone number
One line of text below
Headline:
Location included in the headline
In addition, by center aligning every element, having a dark background to create contrast between both the text and the button, and filling up a good portion of the screen with the hero, visitors automatically see what’s most important to complete the call to action.
The heat map below, which measure users mouses and eye-movement, validated this belief. Notice that the majority of user engagement is happening on the headline and form fields … exactly where you want their focus to be:
This heat map shows where a user is focused when they are looking at the hero section
In other words, the hero test incorporated nearly all of the principles we covered above.
And the results?
A good representation of how the test performed individually can be seen from this specific test from a member in the Alabama market.
The Test Results Speak For Themselves…
This graph represents a stacked hero test (for motivated seller leads) where the control and variation were close … until the end.
The cumulative total was what really knocked our socks off:
A 38.54% increase in online real estate lead generation across the board.
If you’re in the real estate sector, we at InvestorCarrot have a simple way of increasing your real estate leads; we’ve already done the testing for you by creating website templates like the one used in this test study.
And you can have it for free.
Carrot Members:You can dive into your account and launch a new website… then dive into the “Design” tab for the site and select the “Juniper” design to put this design to work for your business. But, you may be asking… “Is this design higher performing than the original Carrot design?” The answer is… in some cases it boosted performance up to 38.54%, in a few, it decreased performance a tad, in several, it was a wash. It did provide a performance boost in most of the 20 or so sites we tested it on but on some, it didn’t… so our advice is if you have a Carrot site up already that is pulling leads consistently to keep it how it is. Our original design is still our most consistent design. This new one just adds another option to get a different look while still retaining GREAT performance.
Non-Carrot Members: If you know HTML and have some time and want to hack through some setup stuff… You’ll need your own hosting, some programming knowledge to hook up a form, and to write your own content on the page. Or you can skip all of that and join Carrot and launch this design along with all of the other benefits Carrot customers enjoy within seconds.
(Already a Carrot member? Great! Launch this design in your account in just minutes! Log in, create a new site, and choose the “Juniper” style.
