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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

7 YouTube SEO Optimization Tips For Real Estate Investors & Agents

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Do you see your competition ranking their YouTube videos at the top of Google for the search terms you want to rank for? Like This?… In this post we’ll show you some YouTube SEO optimization tips that you can implement in your real estate investing or agent companies. In our 90 Day Inbound Online Marketing Action Plan call we did recently we teach real estate investors and agents to have a short-term online lead generation plan and a long-term online lead generation plan. The short-term things are actions you can take to get visitors to your website (cash buyers, motivated house sellers, tenants, private lenders, note sellers, etc.) within the first 30-60 days while your long-term SEO campaigns build. One of the marketing tools we love the most for both our short-term and long-term lead generation for ourselves and our high achieving investor clients is YouTube marketing. We wrote a short post about it last year, this post is a more detailed followup on optimizing those YouTube videos. Infographic: 7 YouTube SEO Optimization Tips To Implement On Your YouTube Videos This Week The Biggest YouTube Video Marketing Mistakes Real Estate Agents And Investors Are Making Every Day The reason YouTube videos can rank so darn fast is because of the “Domain Authority” of YouTube.com. In Google’s eyes, YouTube has the highest possible authority and trust that a website can get. This makes it so any video uploaded to YouTube automatically has a better chance of ranking quickly for search phrases that it may take you months and months to rank well for with your own website with SEO. The ROI of YouTube marketing as a house flipper, investor, or agent can be pretty huge for the time you’ll invest. An average wholesale deal could net you approx $5k on the low end right? Would 3-4 hours of video work and “seo boosting” be worth it for that profit potential? The same for agents… what is your average listing worth? But you only have a better chance if you implement what the graphic above shows and avoid these common mistakes we see investors making. Avoid…  Not using your main keyword phrase in the video title: Most investors will throw a video on YouTube and not really think much about the title. If you want to rank well for “sell my house fast Madera CA“… your video should have those words in it toward the start of the title. Not uploading enough videos to your channel: Every day we see people asking how to improve their YouTube video rankings… then we look at their YouTube channel and see only 1 or 2 videos in there. Google wants to see that a channel is active. So get at least 4-6 videos in there! Use this training video to help optimize your YouTube channel. Not typing up a good long description in the description box: People forget that Google can only read what we give it to read. So use that description area to really talk about the content in the video. Include your keyword phrase and variations of it… and ideally get your keyword phrase toward the start of your description.  Treat the description box like you’d treat the content on a page on your lead generation website. Get good quality content on there and optimize the content for the phrase you’re wanting to rank for. Not linking to your website from your description with the full “http://www.yoursitehere.com”: A solid way to drive people to your website and get a link back to your website is to include a clickable link in your video description! … Continued

Test Results: A 49.5% Conversion Rate Improvement With One Simple Change

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We’re fanatical testers here at Carrot. So much in fact that during any given week we’re setting up multiple tests on our Carrot customers’ websites based on our “data dives” that our team does into the data we’re tracking to help improve the effectiveness of our system each and every week. We’ve have had our heads down the last couple months getting some big projects pushed through, and frankly, have a backlog of test data that we haven’t made blog posts on yet. And, thanks to all of you who answered our Customer Survey a few weeks back and who said, “I want to see more test data on the blog!”… we’re going to start rolling out some results of our conversion tests here on the blog on a more consistent basis. One Of The Most Important Parts Of A High Converting Real Estate Investor Website Is… … the Call to Action area. The Call to Action area is the part on your website that guides the reader of your website (a motivated house seller, cash buyer, note seller, agent, etc) to take a certain action that you want them to take. This could be joining your Discount Property List… getting an offer on their house… or even just a free market report. But there are 3 core elements to a great Call to Action form… 1. The “ask” headline: This is the spot that grabs their attention and hopefully spells out in a few short words the benefit they’re going to get OR simply asks them a question to get them to mentally say, “Yes, that’s me. What do I do next?”. 2. The opt-in form: This is the actual form that people put their information into. We’ve tested variations of forms, numbers of form fields, size of form fields, type of information we collect on form fields… and have found a pretty darn good structure that has increased the conversion rate on our members’ websites dramatically. 3. The action button (or “submit” button): This is often overlooked by people. Lots of people just assume that a person on your website is either going to click that button or not if they’re a motivated seller. But, that’s just not the case. We’ve tested variation after variation of different sizes, colors, positions, and words on the “submit” buttons and in many cases found dramatic differences in conversion rate. The Submit Button Change That Boosted Conversions 49.5% This isn’t the first time we’ve run this exact test… and won’t be the last. But this latest round of tests on the submit button on the main opt-in form on a motivated seller website had some really interesting results. The Hypothesis in this test: Will changing the words on the submit button from a “descriptor” (“Click to Continue” or “Submit”) to a “mental commitment” increase conversions? Every single time we’ve run this test on a real estate investor website we’ve seen an improvement in the conversion rate when we got rid of the “Submit” or “Click to Continue” buttons in place of something that said something like… “See Available Properties” or “Get My Fair Offer Today!” Below are a few shots of the actual tests and heat maps showing the results. Test #1: Motivated Seller Website – Making Button Copy More Relevant This test is actually still an active test but is currently at a 95% statistical chance to produce a winner (which is pretty darn good. We shoot for at least 97% to call it 100% conclusive.) But as you can see in the heat map image above, all we changed was the words … Continued

The InvestorCarrot Marketplace!

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Over the year and a half since InvestorCarrot was born, we’ve had a lot of improvements, upgrades, and new features. Heck in the past 4 months alone we’ve launched hundreds of improvements to make it even easier and faster to launch effective online lead generation websites as a real estate investor, beef up the level of support members get even further than it already is, get your leads faster (sms alerts), make your websites rank better in Google, and convert leads at an even higher rate. But all of that pales in comparison to what we have in store for InvestorCarrot members over the next 4 months :-) Today we’re happy as heck to roll out the first version of our Carrot Marketplace to the InvestorCarrot community. What Is The InvestorCarrot Marketplace And How Does It Help Make Your Life Easier?   As a real estate investor, when getting real estate investing leads online… launching an effective website is just the first step. We already make that crazy easy. <== See a video of the process there But if you’re wanting to drive a lot of traffic to your websites (motivated sellers, cash buyers, private lenders, rent to own tenants, note sellers, etc.) you or someone has to roll up their sleeves to get to work. InvestorCarrot gives you a huge jumpstart with our real estate investing websites to rank better in Google and convert your leads much higher than the industry average… and our support is what we’ve been told time and time again is the best in the industry by far. So now with our new Carrot Marketplace, we’re making it as easy as buying milk (or carrots :-) at the grocery store to find the vendors, services, and help so you can ramp up your results even faster. What Will You As An InvestorCarrot Customer Find In The NEW Carrot Marketplace? Log into your Carrot account and click the NEW Marketplace tab to check it out for yourself. But here’s a quick snapshot of what you’ll find in there right now… and what we have in store for the marketplace in 2015. In this first rollout of the marketplace we’re making it easier for you to get access to the services we’ve already been helping you with and offering for months and months… this just streamlines the process and puts the powerfully into your hands. Online Marketing & Lead Generation Strategy Help And Services Everyday InvestorCarrot customers reach out to us looking for help with their real estate investing PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to help ramp up the traffic and leads. If you’re in a more competitive market (a town over… say 50,000 people)… you’ll likely have to focus some time implementing our 3 Lead Per Day Training to move up the rankings in Google. Carrot gives you a head start, implementing the steps in the 3 Lead Per Day Training give it a boost. So you’ll now be able to connect directly with vetted and Certified Carrot Partners who can do the SEO and PPC work for you if you’d rather just have someone else do it. These same vendors have been working with InvestorCarrot members for over a year and pulled some pretty amazing results in the process (top Google rankings in markets all across the country and consistent leads each and every day) Help Customizing And Optimizing Your Websites We’re always focusing on making InvestorCarrot even easier to get highly effective websites up for your real estate investing business quickly… whether you’re a techie or not. But, if you’d rather have us … Continued