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February Harvest Report – Lead Data & Survey Results

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As we wrap up another month in 2016 we are ready to bring you InvestorCarrot’s lead data for February. Despite being the shortest month of the year, the lead volume was right on pace with December and January. InvestorCarrot members generated 14,178 online opt in leads last month (this doesn’t include the tens of thousands of phone call leads). Which is very close to the 14,212 leads that were generated in January. Consistent lead flow is a great asset for a business. If you are driving traffic on a consistent basis it can make your marketing dollars stretch when you know which channel are your most profitable. Thanks to everyone who took our 2016 survey last month! The survey gave us great insight and data We ran a survey in February to get a little more information about how many deals members were closing from their leads, and to get some feedback on how we can make improve Carrot even more in 2016 (we have exciting news on the horizon). The general consensus among our team after conducting this survey was…we need to do these more often. We got a ton of great feedback from our members and got a lot of great questions from the form. We read through every single submission, suggestion, and question. After talking with our team, we wanted to put together some answers and share some of the data we gathered from the survey. Our hopes in sharing these results, is it answers a question you have, shows you where you are at in comparison to other Carrot members, and gets you excited about some of the changes we have in store for Carrot. So let’s get started with some data and insights we found from the survey. 1. 74% of our members primary investing strategy is either Wholesaling or Fix & Flip This isn’t a huge surprise to us, but we were curious if members were using their Carrot websites for investing strategies that were new and creative. We did find a few note buyers and commercial real estate investors. The breakdown wholesaling came in at 43% and fix and flip was 31%. 2. 34% of our members have closed between 1-5 deals in the past 12 months We are always curious about how many deals our members are closing from the leads they generate on their website. Tracking that data would be difficult and is often left to us reaching out to customers and hearing about their success. With this survey we were pleasantly surprised when a lot of members shared with us how many deals they have closed. Closing 1-5 deals is a huge success and we are proud as heck that our members are turning leads into revenue. Nearly 29% of Carrot member said they have yet to close a deal from their Carrot websites. We are constantly working on ways we can improve Carrot to help bring this number down. 9% of Carrot members said they closed over 20 deals in the last 12 months. These members tend to be leveraging a lot of different marketing strategies and are driving a large amount of traffic. If you’d like to learn about ramping up your marketing budget and leads, consider investing in an SEO firm or a PPC campaign. Talk with us today about how we can help. 3. We asked about what content you wanted us to write…the answer was overwhelmingly SEO We were curious what types of blog posts, training’s, and featured content our members and prospects wanted to read from us. Within our company, we all had our hunches, … Continued

6 Simple (but powerful) Questions A Six-Figure Per Month Wholesaler Asks Motivated House Sellers

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Don’t you wish you could listen in while a 6 figure per month wholesaler talks to a motivated seller? Many real estate wholesalers focus so much on “getting the lead” that they forget that a huge leverage point in closing more deals in the first 3 minutes on the phone with a motivated seller. Bryan Harris, the CEO of  Homes For 10k, a 6-figure per month investor and Carrot member from Memphis Tennessee hopped on and walked us through 6 of his most important questions he asks during the initial motivated seller prospect call. But first, Bryan wanted to stress the importance of perhaps the single most important (yet simple) thing that most investors just flat fail at that is costing them deal after deal without them even knowing it. Did You Know, You’re… Talking with Bryan and several other real estate wholesalers and flippers who do $100k/mo in different markets around the country they always say they’re amazed at how few of their “competitors” call back the leads they get quickly. As InsideSales study said… ‘It’s like taking all of that money you spend on marketing and setting it on fire.” The bottom line there is a lot of competition, so call back your leads as soon as you get them in. There’s no such thing as too fast. Online leads can be a very impatient bunch. Competition can be Fierce. Leads have many other investors to contact, so they expect a very fast response to their inquiries. Ideally, you will respond to them with a phone call within a few minutes. Always be prepared to respond. Have your questions ready to go. You can be the best negotiator in the world… but if you’re not following Bryan’s advice above on calling back your web leads immediately… you’re competition could be grabbing deals out from under you before you even get the chance to call the seller. Quick Tip: Have your web leads instantly sent to your phone with a text message! The Carrot Instant Text Message Lead Notification feature sends you a text message as soon as leads come in so you can tap a button and call back your web leads immediately. This feature alone could possibly save you from losing a deal or more every year and pay for your Carrot membership for years and years and years. Not A Carrot Member Yet? Take a demo to see why the top investors are all switching to Carrot! 6 Simple High-Impact Questions to Ask Motivated House Seller Leads When You Call So, you got a lead that came in over the web, GREAT! You already know that you NEED to call them back immediately and that every minute that passes your chances at turning it into a deal goes down. Now, let’s dive into what Bryan Harris, a 6 figure per month wholesaler in Memphis says on the phone when he talks with motivated house sellers. Now let’s turn it over to Bryan!  Brendan: Bryan, it’s all, you man! Bryan: Awesome, I’ll just go ahead and dive in! Ok, so when I call back a motivated house seller I like to start the phone call very much like I’d start a call with a friend of mine. You don’t want to go straight to the numbers and the deal. I’ll dive into my basic structure for talking to motivated sellers in this post. I’m not really going to give a “motivated seller phone script” mainly because I feel that when you use scripts things don’t come off as authentic and real. So I’d be doing a disservice to you if I told you to “grab my script and … Continued

3 Top Tips for Planning Your 2016 Search Engine Marketing Budget

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How much should you invest in search engine marketing in 2016? This includes SEO and PPC. Well in this post we’ll dive into the 3 things I consider when I dive in to create an effective and high ROI SEM (search engine marketing) budget for myself and the clients that we work with in the real estate industry. If you’re feeling beads of sweat drip down as you try to determine where to spend your marketing dollars to get more real estate deals for the highest ROI, don’t fret. I have three top tips to help you make smart decisions. 1. Dig Into The Long-Tail Keywords, Not Just The “Broad” Popular Ones Your Competitors Are Using Long tail keywords are easier to leverage and often times bring a high quality visitor to your site. Why? They’re very specific – often three to six word – keyword phrases (also less competitive than more general keywords). Long-tail keywords became more important to online marketers with the advent of Google Hummingbird, Google’s major algorithm update in 2013, which gives preference to the long tail keyword. With a recent surge in voice search via platforms such as Siri and Google Voice Search, there’s no question: long tail keywords are more important than ever. People are searching just as they speak, so it’s time to pay even closer attention to real estate investor keyword phrases like, “How to sell my home fast?” vs. just “sell house.” But even if you’ve mastered the art of conversational dialogue and are pretty certain you know how people might search, there’s a science to figuring out how to get ranked for the right long tail keywords with the least amount of effort / cost (relatively speaking). So working with a good SEO agency to ensure you have a solid long tail keyword strategy in place is definitely going to be vital to online marketing success in the coming year. Here is an infographic that dives into the key differences of long-tail vs. short-tail (or broad) keyword phrases. Source: http://reportgarden.com/2015/07/09/short-vs-long-tail-keywords/ 2. SEM Done Right Is Always a Worthwhile Investment There are certain online marketing tactics that are a sure-bet for a long time to come, and SEM is one of them. Overall, U.S. marketers will spend more than $103 billion on search, display, social media, and email marketing by 2019 — growing at a 12% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) — but search will remain the largest share of interactive spend. (MediaPost). Based on our experience, when doing SEO or PPC, businesses are likely to get at least three to four times their money back. That’s being conservative! We have some real estate investor clients “harvesting” over $60,000 in closed deals, or, getting as high as 100-200x their money back, and that doesn’t even include the long-term residual ROI of SEM. But of course, results vary from investor to investor, based on a lot of factors. 3. Think in Terms of ROI Not “Expense” Having the right mindset is crucial when planning your marketing budget. Many real estate investors make the mistake of thinking in terms of costs rather than returns. While costs are an important consideration, ultimately, your objective is to “move the needle” and get a return on your money. Need a little extra help getting that needle moving?  Here’s some extra real estate investor marketing tips to deliver ROI. Don’t focus so much about what you will spend “today”, but rather what you can expect to get “tomorrow” (ROI). Whatever marketing tactic you choose, you want to make sure it’s yielding the highest ROI dollar per dollar. If you’re wondering … Continued

January Harvest Report – Why Website Performance Matters

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The first month of 2016 is in the books. How did you do? Were you able to improve your mindset, your business, or your numbers? For a lot of our members we sensed a change in focus and finding a marketing plan that works for them in 2016. Across our network of real estate investor websites, there were definitely a strong number of leads coming into Carrot sites. Let’s cut to the meat and potatoes and show you exactly how many leads Carrot sites generated last month. Last month Carrot members generated online opt in 14,212 leads. This doesn’t include the thousands and thousands of phone call leads our members have received… which takes it well over 20,000 leads per month. Those include motivated seller, rent to own, cash buyer, and a few note buyer leads. As you can see, these numbers are up from last month’s 13,340… which we expect.  Leads aren’t the only thing improving We have seen a steady rise in sessions (visits) on Carrot member’s websites. As more and more members improve their SEO rankings it is no surprise that we will see more sessions. A Quick Note: A session is a group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views. Another name is “visits”. So what does this all mean? It means that Carrot members are effectively driving more traffic to their sites. This is awesome and is something that we will see continue on an upwards trend. When was the last time you asked yourself why? The last month has been crazy busy for us at Carrot. We have a lot going on and some exciting information to share with you soon. But one thing we realized in the month of January is, with all the planning, all the organization, and all the best intention in the World you really need to ask yourself why? Why am I spending so much time on X. Why can’t I figure out how to rank for a specific keyword. Why is my site not generating leads. Why are you doing what you are doing? If you can’t answer it quickly and with a one sentence that you are proud of, there is a good chance you need to revisit your priorities. Why are you using InvestorCarrot? To get more leads? To have a website that performance for your business? If you said yes, great. But what are you doing to get to your why? More on that later. We wanted to briefly shout-out some members who are seeing their websites perform for them and then break down how they got there. Jeff was wondering why PPC Marketing wasn’t working for him on his non-Carrot website Jeff reached out to Adrian our head Customer Success Hero of Strategy via Facebook after a Coaching Call and informed us that his Carrot site brought him his first lead. Yay! We love to see that stuff on a daily basis. Jeff was using pay per click to bring traffic to his old non-Carrot site, but it wasn’t converting. Instead of getting frustrated, he researched InvestorCarrot, signed up and found that our pages generally convert very well for pay per click traffic. A high performing website was the difference for Jeff For Jeff he simply needed to find a site that converted his traffic into leads. If you are struggling with the traffic side of lead generation have you considered PPC? If you are only using Google AdWords wait until you see what we have next. If … Continued

A New Investor Closing Deals In A Competitive Market – Connor’s $60k Deal Harvest Report

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We’re switching up the format of our monthly Carrot Lead Harvest Reports to not just live up to our core value of transparency by showing our actual data so you can learn what’s working to generate leads online and what’s not… but we want to start to highlight real stories from investors around the country so you know what they’re doing with some of these leads that we’re reporting on each month… and how they’re Harvesting deals consistently online. This month we’re diving into… The “Holiday season dip“ How many leads our members generated and where they came from Highlighting Connor’s story on how he’s “Harvested” over $60,000 in new closed deals in the past 6 months leveraging the InvestorCarrot system and our guidance (awesome!) The Holiday Season Dip (wait for the Q1 bounce!) As we’ve written about before, the holiday season (especially when there is harsh weather like some parts of the country are seeing) sees less house sellers hitting the web to actively sell their home. More time is being spent with families and selling a house around the holidays can be tough. However, the 3rd quarter of 2015 showed that flipping houses in general is up from this time 2014, and the total volume of leads for InvestorCarrot members in 2015 grew by a wide margin from Q1 to Q4. Check out the past months Harvest Reports to see the upward trend. Below we dive into the places the leads came from in December… which shows you that Inbound marketing… specifically SEO and content marketing are still leading the charge by a very wide margin (studies show up to 60% of “direct” leads that Google reports are actually from Google searches). December 2015 Real Estate Investing Lead Sources So congrats to all of you Carrot members who crushed it in December and still had time to enjoy time off, some egg nog, and time with your family. Great way to finish the year! With Fewer Leads In Holiday Months Are Deals Still Closing Consistently? You bet. Realty Trac released it’s Q3 2015 U.S. home flipping report and in that report they state… “43,197 single family homes and condos were flipped — sold as part of an arms-length sale for the second time within a 12-month period — in the third quarter of 2015, 5.0 percent of all single family home and condo sales during the quarter.” Holy cow! That’s a lot of house flipping going on :-) The report breaks down markets for the flips and covers more details about the report and the methodology for which the data was gathered. Knowing that there are deals to be made, it forces you to step back and get the basics down first, and that is generating leads. It’s hard to do a deal without the lead.  Today, we wanted to spotlight Connor, an InvestorCarrot member who was struggling to crack the first page of Google in a crowded market. We interviewed Connor and asked what he did to get to the first page of Google for top motivated house seller keywords in a hyper-competitive market, and how those results have paid off for him.  Connor Steinbrook’s $60k Deal Harvest Story: Closing Deals In A Competitive Market Connor is an investor in the Dallas market, which is one of the most competitive markets in the country. Many of you reading this may be thinking… “But if there are already Carrot members doing well in my market can I succeed too?” Well, read this other post we wrote first, then come back here… but the answer is ABSOLUTELY YES. Connor was brand new into the market in 2015 and got … Continued

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