Search results for: “ppc”

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

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 is cost. I put the cost as last, where many of you guys might be thinking, “Oh my gosh, the cost is number one for me. I don’t have a big budget.” Because a lot of us look at cost differently than we should. Many of us look at the cost as what’s the monthly payment that I will be paying for that tool, or how much am I going to have to pay my buddy down the street to develop my website for me.

But the actual ultimate cost is not the monthly payment you will pay. The ultimate cost is how much money this website makes or does not make for you. So if you use a website like Wix and it’s going to be low cost, but let’s say it loses you one or two deals every year because it’s not set up for performance. It’s not set up to convert well, for page speed, or to rank well in Google. And if you lose one deal every year, let’s say your average profit per deal is $10,000. That cheap website just costs you $10,000 bucks.

It’s often easy to go with the website solution that looks at the lowest cost monthly.

After all, a $10/mo website with one of those low-cost generic website builders is only $120/yr versus what our average investors pay of $99/mo (for 3 websites, our weekly Coaching Calls, our content marketing system, and high-performance built-in).

But when you look at the return, you get for those dollars and your time… the story changes drastically.

1 extra (or 1 lost) deal because of website performance is a big deal when dealing with real estate.

1 extra deal pays for a Carrot membership for 10+ years.

So focus on performance and the return on investment your real estate investing website system can provide you over the long run.

Ongoing expert guidance and help from those who have done what you want to do.

An often forgotten thing critical to your success in generating consistent leads online today and next year (over the long-term) is the support team behind you.

If you go with one of those low-cost website builders, you can better believe that their pricing model doesn’t allow them to invest a lot into building the team and support structure to make your life easier and more successful over the years.

If you’re paying $6/mo for hosting… you may be able to reach out to them for help with basic technical things… but most of the time, the questions that you need to be answered most are the strategy-related questions that can take you from no or mediocre results… to crushing it.

With Carrot, we have amazing support (just ask around)… industry-leading training to show you exactly what our most successful members are doing to drive leads… and our full-time staff is among the industry’s most experienced online lead generation experts (specific to real estate investors). So if you have questions about your strategy… or your PPC marketing isn’t getting the results you need… or you’re ranked at the top of page 2 for your #1 keyword… who are you going to turn to at those cheap and low-cost website builders for the strategy help to get you over that hump?

Weekly Live Coaching Calls, 1 on 1 Strategy Sessions, Industry Leading Training, We’re Here For You

With Carrot, our weekly LIVE Carrot Coaching Calls, complimentary 1-on-1 Strategy Sessions with us, and fast strategy help are all included as a Content Pro member.

It’s like having the most experienced lead generation expert on call… and it’s included in your Carrot membership at only $99/mo.

The difference between amazing and no results is often the strategy help and expert guidance.

If you want to try to save a few bucks and go it alone… how much extra time and money will you invest? For only $99/mo, it’s a no-brainer for high-level investors who recognize the value of their time and expert guidance.

Getting The Right Tools In Place To Grow Your Real Estate Business (and have less hassle with tech issues)

These days your website is one of those tools that is a really important part of your credibility, lead generation efforts, and the future of your marketing.

More and more people are going online to find solutions to their problems (especially on cell phones)… so getting your web presence right is a pretty darn important thing these days.

Just like you get the right direct mail before you spend that money to send out those letters… take the time to make sure your website is dialed in and will convert a high percentage of your visitors you’re working so hard to get… into qualified leads.

We can help you here with Carrot, and we’d love to review your website and give you honest, candid feedback on what you can improve with your current site if it’s at one of those low-cost generic website builders.

Just leave your website URL in the comments section below and we’ll shoot quick videos walking through changes you can make to your current site to make them more effective.

And as always, we’re here if you feel Carrot is a great fit. Just take a demo or check out our pricing and plans.

October 22, 2015
September Lead Harvest Report – Which States And Days Pull In The Most Leads?
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

Here Are The September Lead Totals… InvestorCarrot members generated 16,568 leads in the 30 days of 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 is seasonality to online searches and demand… and make sure you have other types of marketing to help stack on the leads during months that are traditionally slower “seller” months.

As we expected, the lead sources are in a similar order from last month

A majority of the leads coming to our customer sites are from direct traffic, which includes Craigslist ads, SEO, and people just typing in the URL of your website. No big surprises here.

Keep using those.

But, as we’ve seen in recent months again… Facebook (mobile) and Google Adwords continue to be amazing sources of leads. The Facebook leads tend to be cash buyers or rent to own tenants as motivated sellers are harder to attract through Facebook marketing (but not impossible).

Let’s look at the real estate investing leads by state

One statistic that we always find interesting is “goal completion” by state… in less nerdy terms… leads by state.

As you can see in the picture below, the darker the blue color… the more leads were generated by our members in those states in September.

Real Estate Investing Leads By State For September

See The Hot Spots For Real Estate Investing Leads… North Carolina, Texas, Florida & California round out our top 4 states for generating leads.

Now, remember, these are all types of leads. Sellers, cash buyers, rent to own tenant buyers, private lenders, etc.

There are lots of ways you can interpret this… but here’s what we see from it.

The “early mover” markets like Florida, Arizona, and California are hot right now. Many sellers are jumping into the fray wanting to sell their houses and there are a lot of investors looking to buy properties in these markets. But then you see states that have more consistently strong real estate markets that are also pulling in solid leads. Like Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Georgia, and many many more.

If we compare this against the top real estate markets to flip houses in the US in 2015 (below) you’ll see that some of this data matches up quite nicely. Also, you’ll see that in many states in our chart above that aren’t a dark blue… they are still insanely great markets to flip houses in right now. So use both our chart above with the chart below to really target in on hot flipping markets right now.

From MarketWatch For The Top Cities To Flip Houses In… See Baltimore (which is a solid market for Carrot members) leading the pack… along with many cities in Florida and all over the country!

Fun Fact: 20% of last months leads came in on a Tuesday

This isn’t groundbreaking or Earth-shattering data, but it is pretty darn cool nonetheless.

We can drill down in our Google Analytics and see which day generates the most leads for our members.

What should you do with this data?

Well, you can use it to tweak some ads or be more active on social media during these times.

Try tuning your Adwords, or Facebook marketing to use more of your budget on a Tuesday and see if you can’t get a boost in leads. Also, make time to be on Twitter looking at trending topics or ways to engage with sellers and buyers on forums and Facebook discussions.

Google Analytics makes Sunday 0, so 1 would be Monday and so on.

Day Of The Week Leads Come In

The #1 Day Is Tuesday, Worst Is The Weekend… The middle of the week is when you should expect the highest volume of leads.

As interesting as the #1 day that leads are attracted online according to our data… is also the times that the least leads come in… the weekend.

Notice that Saturday was the worse in September, Sunday 2nd worse, and Friday 3rd worse. With the middle of the week coming in on top.

What does this mean? It gives a bit of a glimpse into the way motivated sellers, tenants, and cash buyers search. They tend to want to forget about their real estate issue on the weekends… and come mid week are reminded that they really need to get their butt in gear and make stuff happen.

So leverage this data by bumping up the activity on your social media marketing during mid-week and maybe even making sure your direct mail pieces land in their inbox mid week (test it).

How Is Your Online Lead Generation Going For Your Real Estate Investing Business?

If you’re interested in leveraging our Inbound Online Marketing platform at InvestorCarrot, our training, and our support team, take a demo or checkout our plans.

Over the coming months, we’re developing new PPC landing pages (we’re actually testing them on PPC campaigns right now), new SEO tools to help you more effectively rank in Google, and beefing up our Customer Success team to help investors… from beginners to the most advanced… leverage the web in a more effective way.
October 8, 2015
New Feature Rundown: Lead Source Tracking, GetResponse Integration, and More!

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 list! Now send your new leads directly into your marketing funnel with our native GetResponse.com integration for your forms. GetResponse is an email marketing software that a lot of investors use, so now you can integrate your Carrot forms directly with your GetResponse lists!

Be On The Lookout For Some Amazing Updates In August!

I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag right now but we have some big updates we’re working on for August that’ll help make your life easier in many ways. You’ll have a clearer plan of action to see success with your online marketing, you’ll see some visual updates on the way your Carrot sites look, and much much more!

Let us know in the comments box below what features you’d love to see on InvestorCarrot!

August 6, 2015
7 YouTube SEO Optimization Tips For Real Estate Investors & Agents
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?…

This is a screenshot of a popular motivated house seller search where our InvestorCarrot customers control the top 3 positions in Google. The #1 position is a YouTube video. Learn how to boost your YouTube video marketing below!

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! It’s a no brainer and should be one of the first things you put on your description.
- Thinking your work is over after you upload your video: If you’re in a competitive market where lots of other real estate investors, wholesalers, flippers, agents… etc. are competing for the same search phrases… you may need to add some SEO “boosters” to get your videos to rank higher. Get people to comment on your videos, share it on social media, link to the video, and post the video on your own website too. You’d be surprised how easy ranking a YouTube video can be with a few of the right steps.
If you’re an InvestorCarrot member, our 3 Lead Per Day Training (only available to active Carrot members) dives into YouTube video marketing really deeply and shows you how to make your videos step by step, upload them, optimize them, and “boost” them after they’re on YouTube.

Just check our marketplace to pick up that training course if you’re an InvestorCarrot member.

Or, if you’re not yet an InvestorCarrot member, what are you waiting for? :-)

Carrot Members Control More Page 1 And Top 5 Rankings In Google For Motivated Sellers and Cash Buyers (rent to own tenants too!)…

… than any other real estate investor website platform.

Our prices aren’t the lowest (and never will be)… but our members say the return on investment they get with their InvestorCarrot accounts is one of the best possible investments they could make with those marketing dollars vs. the alternative real estate investor website solutions.

Our members are currently pulling in well over 10,000 opt in leads per month at the time this article is published… plus thousands more phone call leads each month.

And a huge reason is because we focus on making your life easier as an investor or agent when it comes to online inbound marketing.

It’s a mix of…
- Great software that launches websites that give you a head start with SEO (and are completely ready to convert leads for you on PPC or Craigslist from day 1)
- Epic support when you need help (email, live chat, weekly live Carrot Coaching webinars with our team members on advanced lead gen topics and Q&A)
- Industry best online marketing training
These combined have turned into pretty darn amazing results for our clients who trust the system, put it to action, and use the resources you have at your fingertips with Carrot.

If you’re curious about InvestorCarrot and how it can help you grow your real estate investing, house flipping, wholesaling, note buying, or real estate agency… head on over here to take the demo.

Join the thousands of investors and agents who are getting results with InvestorCarrot that they were never able to get before.
May 14, 2015
Test Results: A 49.5% Conversion Rate Improvement With One Simple Change
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

We Added Value To The Button Copy… and made it more relevant with giving them what they want, a “fair cash offer today”… not to “continue”

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 inside that red button. All of the “hot spots” on the pictures are the places visitors to that website during the test were clicking on and interacting on.

The Control is the button that said “Click here to Continue <<<<“… which is what we call a descriptor. It just tells you want to do.

The Variation 1 button says “Get My Fair Cash Offer <<“… which is what we call a mental commitment. It meets the web visitor in the same mental mode that they’re in when they’re on that site… and mentally guides them toward the benefit they want (a fair cash offer on their house, today).

The Results: Out of 569 total sellers who landed on this InvestorCarrot motivated seller website, 59 converted as a lead (a 10.37% average).

The Variation with the mental commitment phrase… “Get My Fair Cash Offer <<” showed an improvement in 49.5% at a 12.55% conversion rate on SEO and PPC traffic… which is pretty darn solid for the home page of a website.

What Does That Mean? Out of every 100 visitors who land on your website, you’d get 12.5 leads rather than 8.3. Doesn’t sound like a huge deal.

But when those numbers add up it gets exciting. At 1,000 visitors to your website (assuming these numbers hold true) that would be 40 extra motivated seller leads.

If you close 1 out of every 20 leads into a deal (which is a low percentage for many of our customers) and you net on average $7.5k (which is much lower than many of our customers net per deal)… that’s $15,000 in extra revenue without having to generate any more traffic to your website. Free money assuming your close ratio per lead stays true.

Test #2: Rent to Own Website – Making Button Copy More Relevant

We Added Value To The Button Copy… and made it more relevant. It helps the person visualize what’s on the other side of the button.

This test was a very similar change to test #1. On this InvestorCarrot members rent to own website we simply changed the button copy from a basic descriptor, “Submit Here >” (which the customer changed the button to that text away from our default text of “Let Me See Available Homes >”… so we wanted to test it again just to prove why it was there in the first place ;-).

A rent to own real estate investing website is going to get a much higher conversion rate than a motivated seller website is just because of the nature of the type of lead.

But the concept still held up in this instance with a completely different type of website and type of lead.

Why? It’s baked into us as humans to want to take the easiest path… the one with the least amount of resistance. If I landed on this website because I did a Google search to find local rent to own homes… and this button reinforces exactly what I want… to see “available homes” right now, I can’t help but follow that path and make my brain happy.

This conversion psychology is built into all of our InvestorCarrot websites and we’re continually testing and improving every single month.

The Results: The variation that had the button copy that was more relevant to what the website visitor was thinking performed higher by 9.63%.

What Does This Mean? Out of every 100 visitors to your website you’d get 3 more “free” leads. Over 1,000 visitors to your website you’d get an extra 30 leads. If you were able to put just 1 out of every 30 qualified leads into a deal that made you $10k… that’s an extra $10,000 in profits per 1,000 visitors without adding any more traffic to your website. Free money.

We’ve run this exact same test on a number of other websites (both InvestorCarrot sites and non-Carrot sites) and results have been similar.

So make sure to update the call to action text on your submit buttons to add more value to your website visitor.

How To Change The Submit Button Text On Carrot Websites In Under 10 Seconds

If you’re an InvestorCarrot member reading this and have set up your website within the last 5 months, this change is already the default setting on all of your websites. Yay! As we find things that perform better, we automatically build them into the system… and in some cases make those changes across the board for our members.

But here’s how you can change your submit button text quickly if yours says “Continue” or “Submit”.

1. Go to the “Forms” tab and click the “Settings” button on the form you want to change.

2. Go to the “Form Button” section and update the “Button Text” box. Done!

Done!

3 Other Call To Action Button Conversion Boosting Ideas

This article is only walking through this one hypothesis… that changing from basic “descriptor” submit button copy to submit button copy that adds more value to the visitor and talks about the benefit they want to get, increases conversion rates and leads.

But, we’ve tested (and are currently testing) many many other elements of the opt-in box.

But here’s some things you may test if you want to get all geeky like us and work on improving the conversion rate of your websites (if you don’t want to fiddle with it and would rather have us do it, we include our conversion testing assistance for any InvestorCarrot customer who is generating at least 100 visitors to their website a month. Why? Simply because we’re dedicated to continually improving the effectiveness of our Inbound Online Marketing System and websites for real estate investors. We don’t just try to make pretty websites. Our members are pulling in over 13,000 leads a month because of the combination between our innovative websites and SEO benefits, our conversion optimization focus, our training, and our hands-on high-level strategy help. )
1. Change the “possessive” noun from 2nd person to 1st person: “Get Your Fair Cash Offer!” to “Get My Fair Cash Offer!” . We’ve shown this to improve conversions in many cases and has been shown to do the same in test after test in other industries.
2. Button Size And Position: I see too many real estate investors websites have their call to action button too small… or it blends in to the rest of the page. We’ve found choosing a button color that stands out on the page (contrasts ideally) and is as large as the form fields have improved conversion rates by a measurable amount. We’re running a button size test right now on the website of one of the largest investors in California… and it’s showing a 200%+ improvement so far (it’s early). And it’s no accident that the call to action button on InvestorCarrot websites is wide, large, and the same width as the form fields (we’ve tested it many many times).
3. Form Fields: Form fields can make one of the biggest differences in your call to action area. We’ve tested it and settled on about 3-4 form fields on your front end form (the form your visitors see first) is ideal for conversions. Then, feed them to an effective “step 2” to further qualify them (it works like gangbusters on InvestorCarrot websites). But don’t take our word for it, here, here, here, and here also tested the same thing and found the same results. It’s human psychology in action.
Image Credit: Hubspot

So if you are making any of those mistakes or just want to test them on your own website, put that in your action plan this week and get to work!

We Think About Conversion So You Don’t Have To

60,000 Leads Per Month (2020) And Climbing – Gotta Love That

Here at Carrot we get emails and live chat messages every week from members who say that their Carrot website performs better than their old website.

Not just in the search rankings (which Carrot sites hold more page 1 rankings for search phrases that matter than any other website platform for investors) but also on the conversion rate.

Now, let us get real here for a second.

Do we have a magic potion that makes our websites convert more visitors into leads? Nope.

You can learn to do your own conversion testing just like we have over the past 7 years… testing millions of visitors to our pages and well over 1,000 individual tests over the years.

Over time you get good at figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

And when a customer emails us saying “I didn’t tweak hardly anything and my Carrot website converts 4x more visitors into leads than my other website”… that makes us giddy like a rabbit in a… well… carrot patch ;-)

So if you just want to focus on doing more of what makes your heart sing (the stuff you love to do in your business) and less of the techie and marketing stuff you don’t like or just flat out don’t have the time for… that’s why some of the top investors around the country work with us.

We’re not the cheapest monthly rate on the block… but like we showed in this post… we’re dedicated to making your real estate investing websites more effective to generate more real estate investing leads for motivated sellers, cash buyers, private lenders, rent to own tenant buyers, note sellers, and more.

And if you close only 1 extra deal because of our commitment to results over all else over the lifetime of your account with us… that alone will pay for 10-15 years of InvestorCarrot service in that extra “found” revenue.

Take a demo of Carrot today or reach out to us if you have questions in the comments section below.

And heck, if you liked this post, hit the Facebook “Share” button and Linkedin button on this page. I’d appreciate it a ton. It keeps us motivated to keep putting out great content like this you can’t get anywhere else in the real estate investment industry.
March 19, 2015
The Carrot Vendor Marketplace!

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

Certified Carrot Preferred Partners: If you want to rank your website better in the search engines, better optimize your SEO, turn on some PPC… we’ve got you covered. Our certified partners have a minimum of over a year experience with our software and our customers before they can be a “Certified Carrot Partner”. Our current partners have pulled top rankings and hundreds of leads for our clients.

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

Want To Be Hands Off? Our team can handle all of your customizations and branding for you if you want. There’s no excuses for not getting results now ;-)

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 do the branding for you… and build out your city-specific pages for you… and help build your personal credibility into your websites for you so you don’t have to lift a finger, that’s where this section comes in.

Access our QuickStart service where we ask you 13 simple questions, and our team gets to work customizing your websites to fit your business, branding, and goals.

Plus have our team help you capture more traffic with city-specific / local pages and more!

These are all things you can easily do for yourself inside your InvestorCarrot account… but if you’d rather focus on what you do best and have us do it for you, we’ve got you covered.

Premium Training

The Fire That Fuels Your Growth: Our 2 flagship trainings (only available to InvestorCarrot members currently) are now in the Marketplace. But be on the lookout for more advanced training and tools to help you get an edge in your market.

Our members are generating well over 10,000 opt-in leads per month right now (that doesn’t count phone call leads)… and a huge part of it is the combination of the effectiveness of our website platform and the training you can access as an InvestorCarrot member.

Right now you’ll find our Posts 2 Profits Craigslist training and our 3 Lead Per Day (SEO, PPC, Youtube marketing course) in the Carrot Marketplace.

But we plan on launching more Premium Trainings in 2015 (in addition to our weekly LIVE Carrot Coaching Calls FREE to Content Pro members) to help you market effectively on Facebook, use Retargeting to “fetch back” more leads, and more! So keep an eye out for new Premium Trainings.

Get InvestorCarrot Swag

Why have a company name like Carrot if you’re not going to have fun with it and be loud and proud about it? Right? :-)

Well, now you can get Carrot Swag right in the marketplace.

Want a t-shirt (American Apparel – Made in the USA)? Grab one.

How about some awesome note pads with our Core Values on them… grab those in our “Carrot Swag Bag” which includes a t-shirt, a NEW Carrot Bud doll, Carrot stickers, and our awesome Carrot Idea Pads.

What’s In Store For 2015 With The Carrot Marketplace?

We’re working furiously on developing new features into the software to solidify our place as the leading Inbound Online Marketing platform for Real Estate Investors… which we’ll release to members as we finish them up.

But, we’ve realized that some features don’t make sense to build into every website that is launched. Things like an advanced BirdDog Referral Program system to help you generate bird dogs to find you more deals. Or “built for you” Podio apps to help you better manage your lead flow. Or marketing campaigns that are crushing it for people. Or 1 on 1 strategy consulting with me and our top performing Carrot members to help you bust past your roadblocks and excel… you get the idea.

So be on the lookout for other resources, tools, and website add-ons so you can further leverage InvestorCarrot to reach your goals.

And heck, if you have ideas for great resources, tools, and new functionality for your InvestorCarrot websites please shoot them our way!

Be on the lookout for more announcements about new features and enhancements over the next several months. We’ve got some in store that we know you’re going to LOVE.

Sound Off Below About The New Marketplace!

Hit me w/ comments and questions below… or if you’re not an InvestorCarrot member yet but are considering it, throw your questions my way! We’re here for you and would love for you to be a part of the success that our members are having (10k+ leads per month and growing!).

January 23, 2015
Does The Bounce Rate On Your Website Really Matter?
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

Thousands Of Leads… have been generated by Carrot members and top search engine rankings for tons of competitive phrases have been grabbed or held in this past week. The AVERAGE bounce rate is 66.54%… is that good? See below…

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 isn’t anything to really sweat over unless you’re really focusing hard on SEO and the conversation rate of your website and are in a place where you’re starting to ramp up your traffic to your website.

If you’re just now getting rolling with your website… or haven’t really started to focus on generating SEO traffic much… skip the rest of this post and go out there and focus on generating traffic to your website first.

NOTE: If you’re an InvestorCarrot member, you can have access to our 3 Lead Per Day training for just $99 that walks through in simple steps how to generate traffic to your websites, rank better, and cut the learning curve. If you’re not generating more than 100 visitors a month to your site yet… don’t worry about your bounce rate! Worry about getting more people to your website first, bounce rate later.

Bounce rate is something we’ve focused on with the way we’ve built our InvestorCarrot websites… so you don’t have to worry about that stuff if you’re a Carrot member.

If you have a website you’ve built yourself, on another system, or had a web guy build one for you who isn’t an expert in real estate investing lead generation… and you’re ready to ramp your leads up… your bounce rate is something you should have an eye on.

Here are a couple of the main reasons you should keep an eye on your bounce rate as a real estate investor.

Bounce Rate Can Affect Your SEO Rankings

It’s been long known that Google looks at hundreds of factors when deciding where your website should rank.

Several of those factors are what are called “user signals”… which are things that the actual website visitor does based on the quality of your website.

According to a recent report put out by SearchMetrics, both Time on Site and Bounce Rate show a positive correlation… that websites that rank in the top 10 in Google tend to have good bounce rates and a longer than average time on site.

There is a slight positive correlation... to having a low bounce rate and longer than average “time on site” by the visitor… as seen by Search Metrics in this recent report. This picture above is just one part of the full report of all SEO ranking correlations.

Your bounce rate isn’t one of the first things I’d tell an investor to focus on to increase your rankings… but if you’re struggling to crack into page 1 or rise up page 1 for a search term like “sell house fast DC” or something… take a look and see if your bounce rate is 70% +… or your time on site is less than about 100 seconds.

If it is — you should do something about it for sure.

With InvestorCarrot, to give you a basis of comparison on the “time on site” metric, below are 2 snapshots from our own Google Analytics account.

Avg. Time On Site For The Past 12 Months Across Hundreds Of Investor Websites

Avg. Time On Site… for InvestorCarrot websites the past 12 months. This takes into consideration the seasonally slower and less responsive winter months for buyers and sellers.

Avg. Time On Site For The Busy Warm Months In 2014 Across Hundreds Of Investor Websites

As a comparison… the average time on site and bounce rate in the “busy” warm months for seller leads

If you see your bounce rate more than what you see above or your time on site less than what you see above (especially if your average visitor stays less than 100 seconds on site)… check out InvestorCarrot.

Those rates are the average rates across our platform… so some members websites are doing MUCH better because they’re driving more highly targeted and quality traffic… while others are driving lower quality traffic that may “bounce” much more quickly.

In the end, your bounce rate and time on site are factors that can affect your search engine rankings… but don’t spend a lot of time on them if you haven’t even focused on the higher leverage activities you can do to rank better first.

Bounce Rate Is An Indicator On Whether Your Site Is Converting Well Or Not

Another thing that the bounce rate is a leading indicator for… is how well your website is performing.

If your website is geared to convert visitors to leads and you have a bounce rate over 80% lets say, you can bet that the website likely isn’t performing very well on the conversion side of things.

But, does a bounce rate of 70% mean that your website isn’t converting well?

Not necessarily.

In some markets with PPC marketing, a 9-14% conversion rate is a solid conversion rate for motivated sellers. You could conceivably have a website with a 70% bounce rate and still have a respectable conversion rate of a lead.

What To Do About Your Website Bounce Rate And Let’s Eliminate The Bounce Rate Fear Today…

If you’re not generating much traffic or leads yet… you shouldn’t even be worrying about bounce rate at all. You should be focusing on the higher leverage things to get traffic to your site. Bounce rate is priority number 1,004 on your list of things to worry about at this point.

As an InvestorCarrot member, go through our SEO tools and training… our Craigslist Marketing Course, etc. And heck, our system already has a very good bounce rate and among the best time on site stats in the industry.

If you’re not a Carrot member, no sweat. There are lots of things you can do to start ranking better in Google and getting more leads. In fact, we have free resources here on this website that’ll help you do that.

If you are on page 1 or close… and are having a tough time getting that #1 ranking and you have a bounce rate over 70%… you may want to see what you can do to improve your bounce rate and time on site… it could help give you an edge in Google’s eyes.

Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
1. Join InvestorCarrot so your website loads faster, is mobile optimized, has better and more engaging content that keeps people on your website longer, and has the conversion elements built into the website to convert higher than the average real estate investing website.
2. If you’re not on InvestorCarrot, if you’re using just a squeeze page… stop! Use a full lead generation website to ramp up your time on site and lower your bounce rate (and increase your leads).
3. Write better and more powerful content that engages the person on your site.
4. Stop using videos that auto play when someone lands on your site (that’s a bounce rate killer).
5. Make the first impression of your website be a good one. It should feel credible, inviting, and make a connection with the visitor.
In the end, don’t fret about bounce rate if you haven’t started to generate more than 100 visitors a month through your SEO or PPC so far.

And if you have a bounce rate over 70% but are still getting great leads… don’t sweat it! Focus on the big things that will help you drive more traffic and improve conversions… and if you keep doing the right things and keep building your website to provide value to your web visitors your bounce rate may just take care of itself.
January 6, 2015
Our 7 Biggest Wins And 3 Biggest “Failures”… Our First Full Year In Business
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

Our Thread Of Awesomeness: A snapshot of just a few things our customers sent to us in 1 week of December on the results they’re getting with their InvestorCarrot websites! That’s AWESOME right there!

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 into work when the customers you work with really like ya.

Customers can rate their experience with us when they connect with us through support and over this past 12 months 90% of our customers rated us as having GREAT service, 8% rated our support Okay and 2% poor (can’t make everyone happy eh :-)… that’s on 3,233 tickets we resolved for our customers in 2014!

How Our Customers Rated Our Customer Service In 2014: 90% rated us as “GREAT”, 8% rated us Good… the other 2%… can’t make everyone happy :-)

Another cool metric we’re proud as heck of… that 98% of InvestorCarrot member support requests were replied to within 24 hours… 89% in under 6 hours… and most in under 1 hour during work hours! Try us and see :-)

98% Of Your Support Requests were replied to within less than 24 hours during work hours… 89% in under 6 hours. Most under 1 hour!!! That’s fast and the best in the industry.

4. Our Carrot Team Grew Stronger

The Core Of InvestorCarrot: Here’s a pic of part of our team here at InvestorCarrot in a recent “in-office” day when the team was working from our headquarters in Roseburg, Oregon. Not all of our team lives in Roseburg… so we have bi-weekly “in-office” days so we can work in person!

Going into 2014 we had a full-time team of 5. With a couple team adjustments and shifts over 2014… we re-focused on the core of what we’re great at… and brought aboard a kick butt new team member in November… and strengthened our relationships with a few key partners to help in areas where we’re not ready to build in-house teams quite yet.

5. Releasing Dozens And Dozens Of Software Updates, Trainings, And Complete New Features
(like sms alerts and more!)

During 2014 we held 50+ LIVE weekly Carrot Coaching Calls (which are included in all Content Pro plans at no additional cost), simplified the software over the way it was to end 2013, added additional features like sms / text message lead alerts, more integrations like Zapier, simplified YouTube video embeds, Content Pro content marketing system, and more!

We’re releasing updates to the software on an almost daily basis… and plan to ramp that effort up in 2015 to really focus on a few big game changers for our customers to help you generate more traffic and leads. Keep an eye out :-)

6. Restarting Our Carrot Blog With Great, Useful Content To Help You Grow

In November we launched the new design of this blog and renewed our commitment to bringing you behind the scenes content that will help you move the needle in your business each week to generate more leads, rank your websites better, increase your website conversion, and improve your happiness as an entreprenuer.

Keep an eye out for our weekly posts in your inbox and join in the conversation each week!

In fact, what do you want us to write about more in 2015? Let me know in the comments below :-)

7. Growing A Profitable, Fun, And Effective Business Starting With Just Our Sweat, Focus, And Hard Work

Too many companies try to hide the “sensitive” parts of their business from their customers… like revenues and profits… but really there’s no need to hide your successes or failures from your clients.

In fact, by growing a profitable company it’s actually a great thing for customers. That means more cash for innovation, more cash for building an even stronger support team (which we’re looking to hire another Customer Success Hero in early 2015!), more cash to move faster to keep YOU… our customers ahead of the curve from your competition.

So we’re proud as heck that we’ve grown a company this past year and a half that is very profitable, without outside funding, with a small team 100% based here in Oregon, that is doing great things for (and with) our customers. Without this big win… the other “wins” above honestly wouldn’t matter… and we’ll continue to grow and manage this company to ensure stability and innovation for our customers and our own families in 2015 and beyond.

3 Biggest “Failures” And How We’ll Improve Them In 2015

With the great year we had… also came some bumps and bruises that we survived. Most of them were self inflicted and totally avoidable… but lessons we had to learn in order to grow stronger to the point we are today.

1. Losing Focus Of Who Our Core Customer Is

This is a biggie. At times during the year we lost our way and created things in our software and marketing efforts that focused on the wrong customer. Our ideal customer is a high achieving investor. Someone who is motivated, who isn’t using real estate as a new business “opportunity”… but rather a serious career, and who is ready and willing to invest time, money, or both to accelerate their results online.

You’ll see a tighter focus on this type of person in 2015 which will dramatically improve your results.

2. Not Building The Business WE Wanted To Build

It’s really easy to listen to outsiders and let their opinions influence the way you live life and grow your real estate investing business. We did that a bit too much at times this past year as well… growing InvestorCarrot at times in directions that really didn’t resonate with me at my core on the reason we created this company in the first place.

Now with a renewed focus on our vision, why we exist as a company, our ideal customer that we can help the most, and the life we want to live… we’re already on an exciting and more focused track to crushing it in 2015… the way WE WANT TO DO IT.

3. Lack Of Organization And Focus At Times Led Us In Wrong Directions

This one is honestly directed mainly at me as the CEO of the company.

This has always been a weakness of mine and something I’m continually working to improve. me personally… not being as organized as the leader of the company as I need to be. Which led to things like announcing releases in the software and training and not hitting many of the dates I put out there, etc.

So the last 2 months I’ve personally had to make a renewed commitment to being more organized. My team has helped with this a lot and we’re now relying better on systems to track our projects, communicate better as a team, and be more focused and clear on our goals and objectives each month and week.

I’ll write a post in 2015 walking through what we’ve done to really start the transformation to working more focused, organized, and be less busy on a daily basis.

Some Things To Expect From InvestorCarrot In 2015

As great of a year it was in 2014… it won’t compare to the year we have planned out for 2015.

Yes, we’ll be continuing to build out the best inbound online marketing platform for real estate investors with additions to help you rank your websites better and easier, track your rankings instantly, increase the conversions on your websites even further, get more leads, manage those leads more easily with systems (like Podio, coming soon), and more!

But what we’re going to really focus on in 2015 is not just features… but finding better ways to help you get personalized guidance to get you the results you want in your business and your life.

This includes…
1. Our New Marketplace – Soon you’ll be able more easily find the tools, resources, training, and help to get you even better results. Look out for this in January 2015
2. More Industry Best Training Opportunities– Our Carrot members have come to know and love our weekly LIVE Coaching Calls with me and our other team members… but we want to spread the love in 2015. Starting in January everyone in our Carrot community can come to a new monthly training call open to all subscribers to our email list.
3. More Personal Guidance – Our customers have asked, and we’re making it easier for you to get more personalized help as you need it as a Carrot member. This means more ways to connect with people who can help you implement your SEO, PPC, and lead gen strategy… more ways to get tailored action plans to what you need to do to get results in your market.
4. Honing Our Inbound Lead Generation Tools Within Carrot – We’re proud of what InvestorCarrot has grown to become. But we have a greater vision for how we can make your life easier and more profitable in 2015 with better tools to help you rank your website, generate more leads more easily, and spend less time customizing things on your websites… and more time doing what you love to do.
We’re really excited about 2015 and are thankful for a great community of investors who are really supporting what we’re doing here at InvestorCarrot to help transform the way high achieving real estate investors use the internet to grow their real estate business.

How Was Your 2014 And Where Do You Want To Improve In 2015?
Let’s continue the convo in the comments below!
January 1, 2015
Advanced: How To Take Back The SEO Keyword Data Google Is Hiding From Your Google Analytics Account

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?

Is Your Google Analytics Like This Too? (sure is): A recent screenshot from inside of our Google Analytics account for some of our InvestorCarrot traffic… 84%+ of the organic keyword data is purposefully hidden from us. Why? (see more below…)

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 on how to do this in your InvestorCarrot account.

If you’re not a Carrot member yet, no biggie. Find out how to put the tracking code on your website or ask your web guy to do so for you (or join Carrot and streamline the entire process :-). You will need a Google account in order to set up Google analytics. If you have this already in place. Great, skip to the next step.

Quick Tutorial For InvestorCarrot Members On Adding The Google Analytics Tracking Script To Your Websites

2. Create A FREE Google Webmaster Tools Account

Next, you are going to need to create a free Google Webmaster Tools account… link that account with our Google Analytics account… account… then find a report in Analytics called Search Engine Optimization.

Ready, set, let’s go.

Head over to Google Webmaster Tools and log in with your Google account if you haven’t already.

If you haven’t already added your real estate investing websites to your Google Webmaster Tools account… let’s do it. It’ll only take 3 minutes.

Add Your Website To Webmaster Tools – Click “Add a Site”

You will be asked to verify a piece of code on your site to prove you are the owner of it. There are a few ways you can verify that you own the website… but the easiest way is usually by choosing the “HTML Tag” option under “Alternate Methods” (seen below).

Verify You Own Your Website

Take the meta tag and copy/paste it into your Carrot site under the SEO tab in the Google Webmaster Tools field. See below

Verify Meta Tag on Carrot Site

Once you have verified the code correctly you will be able to see your site when you log in to Google Webmaster Tools.

3. Connect Google Webmaster Tools And Google Analytics (super easy)

Now we need to go back to our Google analytics and link up our Webmaster Tools account.

On the left sidebar go to Acquisition Tab > Search Engine Optimization and click Set Up Webmaster Tools Data Sharing.

Once you click you will be redirected to a page where you must scroll to the bottom, and find the edit link.

Choose your site and click Save

4. Access Your SEO Keyword Data!

You’ve basically done it!

Now when you go back to Acquisitions Tab > Search Engine Optimization > Queries you should see many of the keywords that people are typing into Google to find your website that was hidden from Google Analytics before.

What These Investor Keywords Can Tell You As A Real Estate Investor

Really, most real estate investors won’t really ever need this data on a regular basis.

For most investors just knowing how people landed on your website is enough… so you can make sure you’re investing your time and marketing dollars wisely.

For more advanced real estate investors who really focus on online lead generation a lot… if you’re curious not just how people found your website but about what specifically they typed into Google to find you… that’s where this data comes in handy.

Here’s how I use the SEO keyword data in Google Analytics to get more traffic (sellers, buyers, tenants, etc.).

If you know that people are starting to land on your website for… let’ssay… “sell my Chicago house fast” because you found it in the Search Engine Optimization Queries tab down the list a bit… you can Google that phrase and see where you come up in the search results. Then implement steps to improve that ranking.

Treat these keywords kind of like an “early alert” that you’re starting to get traffic from a keyword.

Then once you know people are landing on your site from a keyword… ramp that traffic up by ranking better… OR, if you’re doing Google PPC marketing you can add that keyword to your ad groups to target ads to.

We’ll save an even more advanced step which involves using a free Google Adwords account as well to get even better data on your SEO keyword search data that Google is trying their darndest to hide from you for another post soon.

Like this tip? Hit me with your questions or insights on what you’re learning from your newfound SEO keyword data!

December 23, 2014

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