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A Year End Review – Wow, You Made 2015 An Amazing Year!

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Wow, 2015 flew by. It’s amazing how fast the years go by… yet how much you can accomplish in those 12 months when you get clear, get focused on your “big pumpkins” and have a mission that means something to you and your customers a core level. I thought it would be pretty cool to do a quick review of some of the cool things that both YOU… our Carrot community… and us… Carrot the company were able to accomplish together this year. All in all, 2015 was a banner year for our Carrot members and an amazing year of growth for our team and company because we focused so much on the one thing that matters… helping YOU get what you want out of life more easily and more effectively with our tools, software, training, and support. So what happened in 2015? Let’s dive into some cool stuff in this quick post! Carrot Members Are Crushing It With Leads! You guys were a force to be reckoned with in 2015. With over 20,000 leads per month coming in (when you count phone call leads… which we can’t track in Google Analytics currently) you’re pulling in more PPC, SEO, and social media online leads as a collective group than any other real estate investor lead generation platform… by far. Keep crushing it! We’ll help you get there.  375 “Doses Of Awesomeness” Sent In! At Carrot, hearing back from our clients is like fuel for us. So much so that we created an internal tool for our team members called the “Thread of Awesomeness” where our team members add the great things that Carrot clients send in to us on a daily basis. Here is a very small snapshot of some of the messages Carrot clients have sent us recently.  Over 6,600 Live Chats + 17,215 Help Tickets Solved! You guys were busy! And so were we! Our team helped our Carrot members through the tough spots in 2015 in a big way. We process hundreds of tickets and live chats per week and we’re humbled by the ratings you gave our team during your interactions with us. We work our butts off so you can spend less time working with our software and more time closing deals. Soon you’ll be introduced to our newest addition to the Carrot Customer Success team in January… keep an eye out!  We LOVE Chatting With Our Customers. Keep It Coming In 2016! Or, Send Us An Email And Our Customer Success Team Will Dominate That Too! :-) Never Stop Improving Another Core Value of ours is “constant never-ending improvement“… and both our customers and us as a company sure did live that one. In addition to the dozens of features we released in 2016 to help our clients spend less time hassling with tech and marketing issues and to pull in more leads… and dozens of split tests we ran on sites to increase the conversion rates of your websites (to much higher than the industry average)… our members relentlessly showed up to our weekly LIVE Coaching Calls, asked us questions, and helped us find the best ways to help you improve. Keep it up in 2016! We have some amazing new features and additions coming your way!  We Helped Your Conversion Rates Improve Even More In 2015! There are some really cool innovations coming out in Q1 of 2016 based on our continual conversion rate optimization team. It’s this dedication to performance and ROI that has helped you pull in so many leads in 2016 (especially on mobile devices!)   46 LIVE Coaching Calls In The Books … Continued

Seeing Fewer Motivated Seller Leads Right Now? (Here’s Why + How To Fix It)

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So, are you seeing your leads slow down right now versus the volume of cash buyer or motivated seller leads you saw in the summer? Well, you’re not alone. It’s a seasonal thing… and here’s what you can do about it to make up some of those lost leads with other types of marketing.  There’s an interesting phenomenon happening right now that some investors are noticing and I wanted to write a blog post about it to make you aware of it: Some investors (maybe even you) are noticing fewer leads right now… have you noticed that? (It’s not happening to everyone but to some). Maybe you’re seeing this happen and you’re wondering if something is broken on your website or if Google changed their algorithm again. So I’m writing this blog post to let you know: it’s actually very normal… What’s happening is kind of like what happens with the stock market: Look at a chart of the Dow Jones over a period of years and you’ll notice that it trends generally upward. But look at a chart of the Dow Jones over a period of hours or days and you’ll notice that it has a lot of peaks and valleys. The same thing is happening to investors: While Carrot users are noticing a steady increase in the number of leads they get online when you implement what we teach and stick with it, some are also noticing that there are peaks and valleys… and in the winter months leads for some types of prospects (like motivated house sellers) tend to take a bit of a dip. Why? Well, the simple answer can be summed up with a meme from the TV show Game Of Thrones… Winter is coming! Well, actually it’s HERE in many parts of the country. No, I’m not joking. The season and how cold it is outside can affect the number of people out hunting for someone to buy their house. Let me ask you a question: If you live in an area of the country where it snows, when do you think about a snow shovel? Chances are, you probably don’t think about it at the height of summer, when you’re sitting on the beach and watching your kids play in the surf. Chances are, you probably think about it when the forecast calls for snow… or (more likely) after you look out the window one morning and see the ground covered in snow. That’s when you think, “Oh, I hope I have a snow shovel!” and then you go searching for one in the garage. The Home Depot knows this. That’s why, during the summer, you probably won’t find a lot of snow shovels (you might find one tucked away in a discount bin somewhere), but during the winter, the snow shovels are front-and-center… probably the first thing you see when you walk in into the store. There are seasonal fluctuations in many types of businesses (including here at Carrot) and smart businesses know this and they plan for it and deal with it. The same is true for your real estate investing business The exact same thought process that occurs with you and your snow shovel also occurs with the motivated seller and cash buyer leads who come into your business. Here’s Why Real Estate Investing Lead Volumes Can Fluctuate During The Year Motivated sellers might want to sell throughout the year, but there are months when they are more motivated to sell than other months. Cash buyers might want to buy throughout the year, but there are months when they are more … Continued

November Harvest Report – How One Investor Closed 4 Deals In 60 Days

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It’s that time of the month, time for another Carrot harvest report. But this month we are throwing a little curveball that we think you will like. Aside from living up to our transparency core value and showing behind the scenes of our website stats, including how many leads our members generated in the month of November, and of course where those leads came from… we are going to share an inspirational story about an InvestorCarrot member who joined less than 6 months ago and has already closed 4 deals from his Carrot website. We are excited to share stories about members achieving their business and personal goals and want to use these stories to help you get excited about what you can achieve. So here is what you should do. First, dive in and see the November recap on the real estate investor lead volume (motivated sellers, cash buyers, note sellers, rent to own tenants, etc.), read Tim’s excellent story and then implement the same trainings and resources that Tim used to get results. Let’s Get Started With Our Monthly Lead Harvest Report For November As we’ve posted before, the holiday months tend to level off as far as lead volume goes for many types of leads that our clients are looking for. In November Carrot members pulled in 16,616 online opt-in leads (plus thousands and thousands of phone call leads that we’re not able to track), so the month was really a very average month compared with the previous 5-6 months of leads in our Carrot Harvest Reports. SEO remains the #1 way we’re pulling in so many leads followed by Craigslist marketing (which makes up a portion of the “(direct)” lead source), Facebook then PayPerClick leads which are growing. So the bread and butter of what we teach in our trainings for our members is remaining to be extremely strong. Now, with these lead reports each month, you may say… “Ya, amazing seeing tens of thousands of leads each month… but are they turning into deals?“ We don’t have a way of tracking what happens to the leads after a member gets them into their Carrot Lead Database… but we do talk with our members all of the time finding out how things are going and what’s working. We do know that there are tons of deals being closed every month by Carrot users with leads they’re pulling in leveraging our platform. On some weeks we may hear of half a dozen or a dozen+ deals being closed from various members… and those are just the ones we hear about in passing. And here’s one awesome story how one Investor closed 4 Deals In 60 Days. His PPC Marketing leads turning into real deals and real profits. “Before Carrot, I was spending roughly $2k in PPC advertising per month with little to no results…” Tim is a relatively new real estate investor in Delaware and has been a Carrot member for roughly 6 months. Tim is a regular on our weekly Carrot Coaching Calls (for our Content Pro members) where we dive into behind the scenes stuff that’s working in today’s market… and have open Q&A where we dive in and help our members with their biggest strategy related questions. He’d come week after week and ask us questions… then he’d go away and implement and come back the next week with more questions. Pretty soon he let us know he was having his first closing from his Carrot leads (at the start from his PPC campaign). The kinds of students/investorsPP we love :-) It’s exciting for us to … Continued

Here Are The 4 Reasons You’re Not Getting The Real Estate Leads You Want Online

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I’ve got a secret to tell you about the real estate investing business: It’s really a PEOPLE business. You find sellers who need to get rid of a property, and you match that property up with buyers who want to acquire it. But the critical point is that the people make the deal happen. So the express lane to growth as a real estate investor is simple: Get more people of the RIGHT PEOPLE into your investor lead pipeline. Specifically, get more people with properties and get more people with money to buy your properties to notice you. If you’re struggling with getting enough leads from your website, this blog post can help you diagnose what’s holding you back and will reveal some step-by-step strategies to get you moving forward. Ultimately, there are 4 main reasons why you may be struggling with getting leads online as a real estate investor or agent. 4 Reasons You’re Not Getting The Real Estate Investing Leads You Want Online & How To Fix Them 1. Low Traffic or No Website Traffic Your website traffic volume is the first place to start. After all, if you aren’t actively getting qualified people to your website with your marketing, anything else you do on your site won’t matter. The first step is to get eyeballs on your site. I like setting an initial goal to get 10 – 20 people to your website each week. That’s not a large number… it’s achievable, and if you’re not getting 10 – 20 qualified prospects to your website per week with your marketing… it’s your first goal.   So how can you get more traffic (qualified prospects) to your website? We focus on… SEO (ranking high in Google) Paid traffic like Google Ads (PPC marketing) Hustle marketing (Craigslist, social media, etc.) Integrating your website into offline marketing (Direct mail, email signature, etc.) We’ve written posts on this blog about every one of these and have done several webinars on driving traffic… so dive into the resources at your fingertips and make that first goal of 10-20 qualified prospects per month! Here are some resources on driving more traffic to your websites to dive into! Effective PPC Marketing Strategies Training 20 Steps To Optimize Your Google PPC Campaigns Techniques for Creating High-Converting Motivated Seller PPC Ads The 4 Critical Parts of SEO For All Investor Websites 16 Key On-Page SEO Tips To Rank Your Web Pages Better 6 Simple Steps to Master Location-Based SEO Our SEO Bible For Real Estate Investors  7 YouTube Video Marketing Tips For Real Estate Investors Our Famous 3 Lead Per Day Training (40+ videos on SEO, YouTube Marketing, PPC, and more – Only $99) Many more free resources here on our site will also help you increase your traffic. If you’re already a Carrot member… hop on the next weekly Carrot Coaching Call, and we’ll help craft a traffic plan for you right there on the call if you ask us :-) As we’ve written, SEO is a long-term (and high ROI) strategy… so don’t expect 10-20 qualified prospects per week to come to your site from SEO alone right away. It takes time to build… but it’s worth it once it does! Also, Youtube marketing is a way to get your brand to the front page of Google search results (even if your website isn’t there yet), plus it’s a great way to get even more eyeballs on your brand if your website is already on the front page. 2. Low-Quality Traffic To Your Website So you have at least 10 – 20 people landing on your website each … Continued

6 Tools We Use To Work Together Better As A Remote Team

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So, you’re starting to grow your company and you’re hitting those growing pains that come with too many things to do but not enough time to do it. You hire a VA or two… or maybe even some part-time or full-time employees. But if you’re not all working in the same office together… how do you make sure the team works together smoothly when you’re hundreds (or thousands) of miles away? Here’s how we do it here at Carrot and some of the tools that we use every day as a remote team. Making A Remote Team Work There are some amazing things about building a “remote” team. If you’ve never heard of that term, it’s basically where all or most of your team members are separated by a distance (usually in different cities, states, or even countries). This is a pretty darn common thing these days with the technology we have access to that makes working from a distance a lot easier. Now, on the flip side, there are some things about building a remote team that makes building a great company harder. You have to work harder to build a great culture that your team loves being a part of. You have to be more self-driven since your time is usually more flexible and it’s easier to slip into bad habits. You have to make sure you still find ways to build personal connections with your team members so they’re not just a person doing a task… but a person that’s part of the mission that your company is on. How does the Carrot team look? At Carrot, we have a small staff of full-time team members that work here out of our headquarters in Roseburg, Oregon.  Another set of of full-time team members are in other cities throughout Oregon.  Then the rest of our company is all over the United States, working remote.  Utah, California, North Carolina, you name it. So what tools do we use the most that we couldn’t live without? Here are our top 6. Slack – The Way We Communicate Every Day Look at all of the places you’re currently sending and receiving messages. Odds are you’re using multiple programs to communicate with your team. And it’s costing you time and a big hassle for everyone. When we first started this company and had just a few people, we’d basically send each other a lot of emails and if we needed something fast we’d fire up a Google chat. Those worked, but what happened was my inbox would get filled with emails and I’d find myself in my Gmail account all day long. I’m easily distracted, so being in my email account all day long really opened me up to let other people control my agenda with their emails. At times I’d have 150+ unread messages in there. Plus, if we wanted to send a file or a video, or look up a conversation we had in the past it would take me forever to do it and I could hardly ever find past conversations when I looked for them. In the end, we were using all of these systems and I had to be logged into Skype, Gmail, Google Drive, and several other systems. Enter Slack. Slack seems like a totally unnecessary tool when you first hear about it. I thought the same thing when my CTO said that we should try it out. “Arg, another thing I’ve got to log into now?” But now I can’t imagine running our business without it. How do we use Slack to save time and … Continued

Carrot Websites Already In Your Market? 6 Ways To Stand Out

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Carrot websites now control more page 1 Google rankings for motivated seller and cash buyer search phrases that matter than any other real estate investor website platform. So, if Carrot members are already ranking well and pulling in leads in your market… × × Demo Carrot: How many deals are you losing to your competitor’s website? Take a Free Demo … can you get the same (or better) results and tap into that flow of leads as well? We’ll dive into the strategy that the most successful investors are implementing to go into markets that look “crowded” to most people… but end up being very profitable for those who choose to leverage Carrot and personalize it to stand out. The #1 Question You Want To First Ask Yourself So the #1 question you should ask yourself isn’t “Will InvestorCarrot still be effective for me if other people are using it?”… … it should be “If I don’t go with InvestorCarrot, what will I implement instead to generate leads online as effectively as my competitors using Carrot in my market?” Will your other options, even though they look different visually, perform as well and provide you the long-term return on investment that InvestorCarrot can provide? Some may. Most won’t. At Carrot we, of course, focus on performance as the #1 metric… and making it as easy as possible to tap into our proven framework… personalize it to build in your credibility elements… and launch your website quickly so you can start driving traffic to it. Which is why our members are pulling in so many leads and starting to dominate the online markets across the country… and not having to wait weeks or months and pay thousands of dollars to have a custom site built that you hope will perform well once it’s launched that still has ongoing maintenance costs and will have to be redesigned in 2 years again anyhow. Another way to look at it is if a platform and system are proven to work well in your market for your competitors… does that mean you shouldn’t also use that platform that is working well in your market? Consider the sport of automotive racing All of the competitors are in very fast cars… they often start with the same foundation. They start with that same foundation because it’s been proven to work many times over. Then to edge out the other guys, they tweak it, improve it, and get better over time. There’s no long-term advantage for the car that has been winning in the past vs. the new one just entering the league. The guy entering the league today can dominate the circuit 8 months from now. It’s not an “all or nothing” game in car racing. The same goes for online marketing as a real estate investor.  If you start with a solid proven foundation, the small tweaks plus the driver’s skill and desire determine the outcome of a race. You wouldn’t show up to a Nascar race in a Mini Cooper just because everyone else is using “the same” looking Nascar race car, right? That’s what the InvestorCarrot platform is all about.  Building a proven and very effective foundation for you to build your business on so you can save time, save money, earn a higher ROI, and always be ahead of the technology curve. Then, you can leverage our training and experienced team to help you edge out your competition. Here are some things you can do today to separate yourself from other Carrot members in your market, so everyone wins (including you). 6 Ways To Separate Yourself From Other Investors Leveraging … Continued

[Compare] Carrot vs. Cheap & Low Cost Mass Website Builders

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There are a ton of options when it comes to launching a website for your real estate investing business. From cheap and low-cost mass template builders like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, GoDaddy, LeadPages, and others… to high-end custom websites that may run $6,000 or more. So, what are the differences between the different website types and what we offer here at Carrot? Well, I shot a video to answer that very question! Before you dive into the video, I want to introduce the four main things you should consider when launching a website for your real estate investing (house flipping, wholesaling, rent-to-own, note buying, anything). They’re right under the video. Check out those 4 crazy important things to consider before you launch your website… then I’ll expand on that a bit and show examples in the video below. Low-Cost Generic Website Builders vs. Specialized Website Solutions Like Carrot The 4 Most Important Things You Need To Look At With Your Real Estate Website The first is… your website’s #1 priority should be performance. Not how fancy it looks. Not whether you think it looks pretty. Not how fancy the CRM is. And not whether you think it looks different from others in your market. It’s… “If I send 100 qualified people to this website with SEO, PPC, Craigslist, or direct mail… is it going to convert as many of those into qualified leads so my website isn’t a leaky bucket?” Because every lost lead is a lost potential at a deal. And as we always like to say… If you lose 1 deal that would have netted you $10,000 because you were trying to reinvent the wheel or save a few bucks a month and your website isn’t performing like it should… that $10,000 is real money lost out of your pocket. Before you go out to build a real estate investing website on Wix, Weebly, or Godaddy… focus on making sure what you build your website with is focused on performance (conversion rate optimization) as its main priority because a high performing website means more visitors converted into qualified leads (and in turn, more deals closed). The second is… ease of use. There’s got to be some way to ensure you’re using the system well. We’ve taken 80% of that off your lap and built it into our platform. Many of our Carrot members don’t even use our system. They hire us to do some of the build-outs through our services, or they might hire some other people or they have their friend use the system, and they just go be the agent or be the investor. So you get to choose how much of the system you will use yourself versus just wanting to pay people to do that for you, so you can do the parts you enjoy and love. The third is… aesthetic We want to make sure that number one, you should be proud of the website that represents your business. Aesthetic is number three in my eyes because aesthetics only matters to you from that perspective. The aesthetic is what you think about your website. Performance is what your prospects think about your website. The aesthetic is “I think it looks pretty.” Performance is your prospects say it solved their problem and got them to opt-in and become a lead. So that’s why aesthetic is number three. Many agents and investors put aesthetics as number one. They lower performance and end up having so many lost leads and deals because they think prettiness and aesthetics are more important than performance. Fourth is… cost. And then last here … Continued

September Lead Harvest Report – Which States And Days Pull In The Most Leads?

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By now you should be catching on with what these Carrot Lead Harvest Reports are all about. Each month we are committed to opening up our data and showing where the real estate investing leads on our platform are coming from. We love to be open and transparent, and hopefully, these numbers are as exciting to you as they are to us. This is a great way for all of the Carrot community to keep a pulse on what is working and introduce new online marketing opportunities for real estate investors. For InvestorCarrot members, use this as inspiration to know that what is at your fingertips with the InvestorCarrot platform, our training, and support is crushing it (in a good way) for our members… and it can for you too. For non-Carrot members, use this as research to find out what’s working in today’s market… and get out there and implement! A Few Quick Notes Before We Dive Into The Data What types of leads are they? The leads we are showing are motivated seller leads, cash buyers, rent to own tenants, note sellers and some private lenders mixed in there. The cash buyer, rent to own tenants and motivated sellers make up the bulk of the leads you will see. Do these leads include people who called on the phone?  Nope, the numbers you will see on this page are ONLY leads where the seller, buyer, tenant, etc. put in their information into one of our InvestorCarrot member’s websites. Right now we can’t track phone call leads on member’s websites, but from our surveys and talking with customers that is likely another 5,000-8,000+ leads per month coming in from phone calls. But for the sake of this post, we’re only going to show what we can back up by data… and since we can’t currently track phone calls our customers receive… we’ll leave those leads out for now. What are leads that show up as “Direct” in the stats? Great question! Google started showing a huge chunk of traffic in Google Analytics as “Direct (none)” a while back. In the past, “direct” meant that the person actually put your URL into the browser and went to your website. But now, Google is mixing in a huge number of visitors that actually came from Google searches. Some studies show that 60%+ of the traffic that shows as “direct” is actually from Organic Google search. Google just does a good job of hiding that from us for some reason. So for the sake of this post, we’re going to say 60% of the “direct” lead source is actually SEO related. Online Lead Generation: 16,568 Seller, Cash Buyer, Rent To Own & Tenant Leads Came In During September If you are following our monthly harvest reports you will notice September’s leads were slightly less than last month. Whenever you study data like this, you must consider historical relevance to understand what the data is actually saying. Summer Months Are Heavy Motivated Seller Months… fall and winter dip a bit historically. As a real estate investor, you are probably aware that leads tend to get a little harder to come by in the winter months. But the seasonality of leads shouldn’t deter you from ramping up your marketing efforts. We expect to see this trend continue through the fall and holiday months… then come January we usually see a hefty increase for cash buyer leads because investors are looking at their goals for the year and start to seek out new investment opportunities. What does this mean to you as an investor? Make sure you know that there … Continued

New Feature Rundown: Lead Source Tracking, GetResponse Integration, and More!

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We don’t do this very often, but we want to get better at it! This post is just about some of the powerful new features we have launched for Carrot customers over the last month. Referral & Lead Source Tracking Have you ever got a lead and wondered how they landed on your site? Was it SEO? Was it a PPC campaign? Did it come from Facebook?  Well now you’ll know where all of your leads came from.  With our new “Lead Source Tracking” feature you’ll see where every lead came from in an instant. You have always had access to some of this data if you were a Google Analytics wizard, but now every lead that comes through your site says where the they came from – helping you see how your marketing is going, and how people are finding you online. Simple Display in Your Lead List Want to see your lead’s source right there with your other form data? Just click the gear icon, on the Forms >> Entries page… add the column to your active list for that form, and you’re all set! Full UTM Link Support – ADVANCED FEATURE If you are not already using UTM style tracking links for your marketing efforts, start now if you’re already generating a good amount of leads and traffic. A lot of email marketing tools like MailChimp have this built in, and anywhere else you put up a link to your site, you can build your own links that show you how your visitors are getting to your site, and ultimately: how effective each of your marketing methods are. UTM tracking links are standard for Google Analytics, and now every lead in your carrot account is compatible with these links as well. So if you set up a code that includes even more specific data about the campaign, that will be saved to your lead and you can review that for each entry. Again, this is an advanced feature, so if you’re just getting started you can ignore this one :-) Email Notification Support You can even add the lead source to your notification email to see the source as soon as the lead comes in. Just edit your admin notification email, and choose “{leadsource}” from the dropdown to add it so you can see right there in your email inbox where that lead came from. Page URL in Admin Lead Notifications This is a question we got a lot – “I have more than one site, and when I get lead notifications, how do I know which site it came from?” Well, now all admin notifications that include the full entry details also contain a link to the page the form was submitted on… so you’re never guessing which of your websites the lead came from. Easy peasy. Short Codes in Lead Form Titles/Descriptions This is a simple, but powerful new feature – use your “Company Info” shortcodes right inside of form titles and descriptions. New Carrot sites take advantage of this new feature out of the box from now on to help further customize your website content automatically, and existing customers can add those shortcodes into any of your existing forms as needed! Company Info in Lead Form Notification Emails Another simple new feature that makes your email notifications to new leads more personalized and credible right out of the box (on new sites). Have Carrot sites created already? Just edit up your form notifications and check out the new “Company Info” options when add in merge codes. Get Response Integration Here’s another often-requested integration checked off the … Continued