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[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

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