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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

Does The Bounce Rate On Your Website Really Matter?

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At least a half dozen times a week I get emails from our customers and Carrot newsletter subscribers asking a question like… “I see my bounce rate is 72% and that seems high. Is it? And does the bounce rate on your website really matter?” First off… you may be wondering what a “bounce rate” for a real estate investor website is… why your bounce rate matters (and why it may not matter much at all)… and whether yours is even high in the first place (because it may not be). A few things to think about before I dive in… so you know whether this post is for you. Do you value ranking high in Google for phrases your motivated seller, buyers, tenants, private lenders, etc. are searching? Do you want to increase the number of leads you’re getting online? If so, you’ll want to read this post :-) First… Does The Bounce Rate On Your Website Really Matter? What Is A Bounce Rate Anyway? (in simple terms) As far as Google is concerned, in their own words, a bounce rate on a website is… “The percentage of single-page sessions on your website”. In simpler terms… the number of visitors to your website who land on your site… then don’t click anything else and visit any other pages on your site. Now, that’s the technical term. But keep in mind… since your real estate investor websites should focus on generating leads… and a certain % of your visitors will just pick up the phone and call you (especially motivated sellers with our InvestorCarrot websites) without clicking on other pages on your website, those visitors will be considered a “bounced” visitor as far as Google is concerned. So for a lead generation focused website that has a clear call to action for the visitor to pick up the phone and call you, your actual bounce rate may be a tad lower than your Google Analytics bounce report is showing you. In addition, I’ve been asked hundreds of times… “What is a good bounce rate?”. Really that’s a tough question. It really depends on where your traffic is coming from and what the purpose of your website is. If you run a news website and you have a bounce rate of 75%… that may not be a bad thing because people tend to read 1 article and then leave. If you run an online store selling cool gadgets… and your have a 75% bounce rate… that means people aren’t engaging on your site, checking out other items, or placing things in the shopping cart. In that case 75% isn’t a good thing at all. Last, if your website is geared primarily as a lead generation tool (especially for motivated real estate sellers)… you shouldn’t really expect a bounce rate below 40%. Heck, you likely shouldn’t expect a bounce rate much below 60% on a page specifically geared to get a motivated seller to sell you their house (unless you use one strategy that we’re testing right now that is yielding lower bounce rates but sellers that aren’t as highly motivated in general… but the jury is still out). As a great basis of comparison… below is a screenshot of the traffic stats from our Carrot customers for this past 7 days. Actual Traffic Stats From Our Members Websites In The Past 7 Days Why Can Your Bounce Rate Sometimes Be A Big Deal (and when you should not pay much attention to it)? Before you check your Google Analytics account and freak out because your bounce rate is 75%… just know that your bounce rate … Continued

Our 7 Biggest Wins And 3 Biggest “Failures”… Our First Full Year In Business

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I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing… but it’s been insane how darn fast 2014 flew by. It seems like just last week I was sitting at a local coffee shop I like to hang out at on “non office days” writing up my 2014 goals… and getting with our team and jotting down how we’d rule the world in 2014. And the funny / scary thing is… the years only get faster. Before we know it we’ll be looking back on 2015 reviewing how the year went… and asking ourselves if we did what we wanted to do the previous 12 months. That to me is a huge motivator. Knowing that time is going to pass whether I get focused, excited, and make stuff happen or not. So we might as well give it all we’ve got… ignore the naysayers… and crush it in life and business. So… with the end of our first full year in business here at InvestorCarrot… providing what high achieving real estate investors all over the country are calling “the best real estate investor websites I’ve seen” again and again (we’re attracting more top notch investors in each market than any other website system for real estate investors)… I want to dive into some of the things the InvestorCarrot community was able to achieve in 2014… some of our biggest wins and failures as a young company… and what you’re in store for in 2015 as an InvestorCarrot community member (whether you’re an active customer of ours or not… you’ll benefit BIG TIME in 2015). 7 Things We’re Insanely Proud Of For 2014 2014 was a great year for us as a company and for our customers… here’s 7 things we’re proud as heck of for 2014. 1. Tons Of Customer Love And RESULTS (Leads and Deals) In Our Thread Of Awesomeness Around the start of 2014 we started something we call the “Thread of Awesomeness” here at InvestorCarrot as an internal team tool to help us all keep our eye on why we do what we do. Each week… when any member of our team interacts with a customer who has an AWESOME result or experience… we throw it into this chat thread that we use internally as a team… called The Thread of Awesomeness. I wish I could show you all of the hundreds of awesome comments customers sent us in 2014 (we averaged 7 per week!)… but this snapshot below from just 1 week in December is a pretty good representation of the types of “AWESOMENESS” happening for our Carrot members using our system. That stuff keeps us motivated to do what we do… and our team 2. Nearly 500% Increase In Traffic and Leads For Our Customers! This kind of speaks for itself. Almost a 500% increase in traffic to our customers websites. A few cool stats for the year… 2,052,930 page views 656,736 visitors Nearly 1 million visits An average visit time of almost 2 and a half minutes (average… our most successful members are seeing a time on site of over 3 minutes!) And this winter our customers generated nearly 10,000 leads per month to their websites (and growing)   3. Spreading Carrot Delight To Our Customers With Crazy Great Support! One thing I said I wouldn’t compromise going into launching InvestorCarrot was on support. In fact… “delivering wow” to our customers is one of our Carrot Core Values (which we both live by and work by). To us here at InvestorCarrot great customer experiences is a heck of a lot more fun than crappy customer experiences. It makes it fun coming … Continued

Advanced: How To Take Back The SEO Keyword Data Google Is Hiding From Your Google Analytics Account

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In the “good ol’ days” you could log in to your Google Analytics account and actually see what keywords your website visitors typed into search engines to land on your website. Knowing how a motivated real estate seller, tenant for a rental property, cash buyer, etc landed on your website is a big deal. It shows you what is working on your real estate investing website to get people to your site, what to keep focusing on, what to stop doing… you get the idea. But… today… your Google Analytics account may look a bit like this picture below. I took this screenshot today on the traffic from some of the recent organic search engine results from our InvestorCarrot platform. NEW! Check out Carrot’s refreshed robust analytics for Carrot members. 84.17% Of Our Investor Keywords Data Is Being Hidden From Us By Google… What’s The Deal? Now, before we dive in deep here… I just want to let you know this isn’t a new development. It actually has been since 2011 but many of our InvestorCarrot customers have been asking us how to find out what search terms their leads are typing in… and this is the largest thing in your way right now to getting that data. In fact, according to one website… up to 88% of organic search keyword data is hidden purposefully by Google (to force you to “pay to play”). Why Is Google Analytics Not Showing Me My Organic Search Keyword Data? A while back Google implemented SSL encryption on all Google accounts. That means if you are logged into Gmail, Google+, YouTube or any other Google service, your web searches are secure and won’t end up in analytics. What this means in terms of SEO keywords… is you (as the searcher) are not showing up in analytics with the keywords you used in that search on the websites you land on. Good for the privacy of the searcher… … not good for us as online marketers. Rather than showing the SEO keyword data on what your website visitors typed into Google to find your site… it lumps all of those searches together into the ” (not provided) ” group. But, we have one simple trick for Carrot members to grab back some of this missing data so you can know where more of your website visitors are coming from.   Time to take back some data. Let’s dive in! How To Take Back Some Of Your Organic Keyword Data In Google Analytics (a 15 min trick that’s worth it for advanced real estate investor / online marketers) Before we dive in… if you’re a newer real estate investor and you’re getting less than 100 visitors a month to your website… we suggest you stop here and don’t get overwhelmed by going through the process below. Why? Because in the end… we like to teach “just in time” learning and implementation… not “just in case” learning and implementation.  Don’t waste the time trying to figure this out when right now you should focus on getting your website ranked higher in your market and driving more traffic to your site. If you’re getting 100+ visitors from Google searches per month… this may be something you might want to tackle. The basic process we’re going through here is to connect 2 separate FREE Google services to get the data we want to see. Ya… a pain in the butt… but totally worth it. 1. Set Up FREE Google Analytics Tracking On Your Website If You Haven’t Already First things first, we need to get Google Analytics tracking code on your Carrot site. Here’s a tutorial below … Continued

14 Real Estate Investor Lead Generation Strategies

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Don’t make your real estate investor marketing tough on yourself! Just take it one step at a time. Today’s post will show you expected and unexpected strategies for real estate investor lead generation. As the real estate market gets increasingly competitive, the search for quality inventory becomes tougher every day. If you’re like most of our members, you’d prefer to have your phone ring… you don’t want to cold call people from a list, right? I’ve done quite a bit of cold calling over the years myself, and even though I’m pretty good at it, it’s way more work… it’s a whole lot easier to learn solid inbound marketing practices from others, then replicate them for yourself. My goal here of this blog is to take the best practices from others who are some of the best at real estate investor lead generation and bring them to you. Like a butler carrying a silver tray…. I want to serve lead generation techniques to you with style. :) We’ve shown you the not-so-secret formula for lead generation is simple: traffic & conversions. One fun thing to remember: traffic can come from anywhere. If you have a creative, fun or clever way to generate leads: do it! Don’t get stuck in “paralysis by analysis” — trust yourself when you think “hey, this might work.” Unique Strategies for Real Estate Investor Lead Generation The Expected: Google Search Optimize Your Real Estate Investor Lead Generation Websites Craigslist for Real Estate Investors Bandit Signs and Bus Stops Direct Mail Bird Dogging Develop Properties The Unexpected: Bing, Yahoo and “Off-Google” Search Optimize Yelp, Facebook… Everything Local Classifieds Flyers at Laundromats and Non-Profits Door Knocking with a “Down Payment” Turn Your Vendors Into Business Partners Develop Communities Expected: Google Search Definitely one of our favorite places to generate leads! A good chunk of our business comes from folks who search phrases like “real estate investor websites” online… then discover InvestorCarrot. They check us out, learn that we’ve got an awesome reputation… then start learning from us, launch a website, follow our training… and then get great results. Lots of our members are beating their competitors on the top Google keywords in their markets using our sites. It’s super cool to see. Our sites are written around some of the most frequently-searched keywords that generate >80% of the leads in most markets. We teach content marketing to real estate investors — so not only do you learn the top real estate investor keywords we use for our sites, our training teaches you how to generate leads from Google. Unexpected: Bing, Yahoo and “Off-Google” Search While Google gets about 66% of the traffic, they seem to get about 99% of the attention. That leaves almost a third of the traffic out there without much competition. PPC costs are usually way lower on off-brand networks (although the conversion rates are often lower too, it still often ends up being cheaper than Google). Expected: Optimize Your Real Estate Investor Lead Generation Websites You know that you should be optimizing your website, right? Optimization is critical to getting found on search. Fortunately, it’s super easy to optimize your Carrot site… we have the tools built right in, and we can help you rank high in your market. Unexpected: Optimize Yelp, Facebook… Everything Did you know that investors are using pages on other platforms to crowd out their competition in search, too? I’ve seen pages on Yelp, Facebook, YouTube, Zillow, blog sites, and other big platforms used to dominate top keywords in busy markets. This is a really smart strategy because sites like Yelp and Facebook already have a ton of authority, so it’s way … Continued

SEO for Real Estate Marketing | 5 Times When You Should NOT Use It

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Trying to decide if SEO is a good strategy for marketing your real estate business? This post will help you. SEO for real estate marketing can be a great source for lead generation, but there are some situations where it’s a terrible waste of time and money. 5 Times When You Should NOT Use SEO for Real Estate Marketing Here’s when NOT to use SEO for Real Estate Marketing… 1. When you’re starting a brand new business There’s just too much high-priority work to be done, and you should NOT be focusing on search engine optimization. When you’re new to the business or setting up a brand new website, you should focus on driving traffic to the site via methods like Craigslist, PPC, direct mail, bandit signs, flyers… anything that can reach folks right now to bring you a lead today. 2. When you need leads fast It takes many months for a new site to rank high on Google, so don’t expect leads from local search to pay your bills anytime soon.  If you’re trying to rank high for an ultra-competitive term, it can take lots of time, money and effort before you see a big pay off. SEO is always a long-term investment. The return on investment can be huge, but it’s never a fast source of leads. The fastest and cheapest source of leads that we’ve found so far is Craigslist. Right now, our members are getting insanely great results from the Craigslist training that we recently launched… so if you’re already a Carrot Member wanting fast leads, access that Craigslist training here (and if you’re not already a member, sign up here). 3. When you don’t have the budget Good SEO efforts require time from people who know their stuff. It’s complicated work. If you’ve got the time and the passion to become an expert on SEO, we are happy to help you learn. We’ve helped lots of folks learn how to generate leads from SEO with our real estate training, but you’ve gotta be willing to put in the time and energy to learn those new skills. SEO services can be relatively cheap – starting at $5,000 per year – just one deal can pay for the whole year. We know lots of SEO companies out there charge way more than that, and they don’t deliver results. But don’t hire an SEO service if you’re not financially ready yet…. do a few deals from other sources, and add SEO to your long-term marketing strategies when you’re ready. 4. When you can spend the money better elsewhere Don’t do SEO because it seems cool, sexy or everyone else is doing it. Those aren’t good reasons. SEO should be a key part of your business strategy, but it’s not critical to your success. In fact, if your market is under 200,000 people, SEO might not be able to produce much ROI for you. If the search traffic isn’t there, you won’t get any leads. Doing SEO for a term that’s not getting any searches is like fishing on a dry creek – if you’re having fun, great… just don’t expect to catch anything. You know it already, but I’ll say it again: There are lots of ways to get traffic to your site. Sometimes a few hundred dollars worth of cheap signs can get quite a few leads into your business. Sometimes a few Craigslist ads are enough to bring in the next deal. Sometimes a good AdWords account is enough to bring in a consistent flow of leads. Sometimes all it takes is a flyer hanging up at the local laundromat. After all, if folks can’t afford to fix their washer … Continued

How Real Estate Investors Can Dominate Local Search to get 58.2% of Motivated Seller Traffic

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Want to dominate your local market? We’re getting ready to launch our Market Domination Plan, so in today’s post we want to share a few of the strategies already being used by top investors around the country to get the majority of Motivated Seller leads in their local markets to them (instead of their competitors). Of course, these strategies can be used to get leads for Cash Buyers, Private Lenders, Rent-to-Own Tenants, or other target audiences, but Motivated Sellers are the hardest – at least right now. As you probably know, inventory is a big challenge around the country. Most investors I talk to are having a pretty easy time growing their lists… as long as they have inventory. The ones who don’t have properties to sell are struggling to catch up. Why is it so tough to get inventory? In most markets, it’s not too hard to sell a property. There are tons of investors and retail buyers competing for a limited amount of homes. Pure and simple: in lots of US markets, demand is high and supply is low. But don’t get me wrong – there is still an incredible amount of opportunity out there. It’s just getting tougher every day to capture it in some of the biggest markets. That’s why we came up with the Market Domination Plan – to help those investors who are already succeeding and are ready for growth. Market domination starts with capturing organic search traffic. Like it shows in the chart below, 91.5% of search traffic comes from page 1. SEO for real estate investors is really important for your business! We can help you out. If you’re looking to move up in your rankings, we can help – just click the image above to find out more about our SEO service. Now, keep in mind that the data is from thousands of websites, not just real estate ones… we’ve found there’s actually some great traffic that comes in off of positions 2 and 3, not just #1 – but really, when we’re taking on SEO clients our goal is to get within the top 5 positions for our targeted keywords. We only start with 3 keywords, because it doesn’t make sense to over-optimize a site for too many keywords – plus it just takes too long to see results when you’re diluting your efforts all over the place. “We have 2 new ones under contract probably 5 waiting in seller signatures. Doing ppc under our carrot site and your SEO do we should continue to get more and more leads.” Guillermo Coronado Most investors don’t achieve any big share of the market because they’re diluting their efforts all over the place… great marketing really requires not only a strategic plan, but a great deal of focus and commitment to implement the plan. Most folks give up on a method before it even has a chance to work… or they fail to do the right research before they start implementing. Either mistake can crush the ROI right out of a great campaign. But let’s assume that you’ve already ranked your site high on all the major terms… is that enough to crush out the competition? Nope, sorry…. you’ve got to occupy the prime real estate from more than just one site if you’re going to dominate that market – and shut out other investors from grabbing the leads. Here’s what that looks like: Cyndy is generating hundreds of leads with her Carrot sites… click that image to go see Trevor’s deep-dive Case Study to learn what she’s doing to dominate her market As you can see from that image above, … Continued