Be a man or woman of integrity, both with yourself and others. Not only will this build confidence, but it will allow you to hit bigger and bigger goals because you have a track record of following through.
– Greg Helbeck
The Analytics, Data, and Numbers You Should Be Tracking to Gain Consistency in Your Business w/ Greg Helbeck
In the first episode with Greg Helbeck we talked about negotiations, raising margins, and the questions he always asks his leads when talking about their property.
A lot of his deals are done remotely, which makes it even more important that he stays on top of his analytics. Today we will be diving into what you should be tracking, how you should be tracking it, and who you should be comparing yourself to. (Hint: it’s not other people.)
Read the Full Show Notes Below…
Greg lives in San Diego but does most of his deals in his home state of New York. As such, he relies on the data to tell him what’s working. Just showing up each day and being productive isn’t enough. You need to know what’s working, what’s not, and more importantly why.
This will allow you to pinpoint where you need to step-up or step-back
Metrics = Freedom
For many entrepreneurs, taking action isn’t a problem. They thrive on the hustle and have the motivation to work long hours day in and day out. The thing is – maybe they don’t have to.
When Greg started his business, he was putting out signs, knocking on doors, doing Craigslist ads, handwriting letters, and everything else new investors do when they are looking for those first few deals.
What he didn’t realize is while he felt like he was being productive in his goals, what he was doing was actually pushing them further away from them. He wasn’t tracking what he did, when he did it, or what the results were. He was throwing out a net and hoping for the best.
While his persistence helped him find his initial success in real estate, if he had been tracking, he would have been able to accomplish more, while spending less time and money in the process.
What to Track
When Greg realized he was in the direct marketing business and not the real estate business he had his lightbulb moment. He knew he needed to better gauge his efforts so he could grow his business and find better uses for his time. Greg began tracking his metrics strategically.
Income – Are you really making money? The first thing to do is make sure your books are in order so you know exactly where you’re starting. This will help you to forecast and set the goals to help you get to where you want to be.
Leads – Take a look at your leads about once a week. Where are they coming from? Who are they? How can you help them?
Offers – How many offers are you making each week? Who are they for?
Deals – How many of your offers are actually turning into closed deals?
Revenue – How much are you making per deal and what could be done to improve your margins on the next one?
Once a week Greg will sit down for about 20 minutes to review his numbers. On a monthly basis, he will spend an hour or so to take a more in-depth look to make sure things are staying on track.
Putting it All Together
When Greg is tracking these analytics in his business, he will look at his past performance to forecast the future. If his business isn’t performing how he would like, he can look at the numbers to see where he can improve.
While building Carrot I have learned that you don’t need to track each and everything, rather focus on the 3-7 KPIs that really matter. If we aren’t hitting our numbers, it’s not the end of the world, but at least we will be able to determine where we need to improve.
Playing the Long Game
Keeping track of your numbers doesn’t need to be a long or intimidating process. A simple spreadsheet can help you quickly compare trends from one week to the next. You’ll be able to forecast and predict your outcomes and if something isn’t lining up, you’ll be able to respond accordingly.
When you are first starting out, it can be easy to become discouraged by low numbers. It’s important to remember that in many cases, the efforts you are putting in now, will be rewarded not today, but a couple of months down the road.
PPC, SEO, and direct mail campaigns all take time to build momentum too.
Stay the course and always lead with math over emotion.
Setting Your Benchmarks
As Simon Sinek says in his book, The Infinite Game, we are in this for the long haul. There is no end or defined players. Businesses change all of the time and the bell isn’t going to sound for things to stop.
When setting your goals and benchmarks, it can be so easy to compare yourself to what others in your field are doing.
Social media can give the appearance of “success” but you never know what is going on behind the scenes.
To define your goals, all you need to do is try to be a bit better than you were before. It is nice to set targets, but as you grow your business it’s ok to take some of the pressure off and just enjoy the ride.
Put the right things and people in your ear. If you keep sitting on it without taking action, opportunity is going to pass you by for sure.
– Russ Williams
$420k in 6 Months of Flipping Land with a “Basic” Carrot Site
Buying and selling land is a powerful investment strategy that anyone can do. With little overhead, low competition, and an abundance of leads, creating a land investment business is a popular strategy we are seeing with many of our clients. Russ Williams has worked as a loan officer, flipped properties, and held a portfolio of long-term rentals. However, it has been land that has allowed him to grow and scale his business without any ceiling. Here’s the story of how Russ made $420k investing in land in just 6 months using a basic Carrot website.
Read the Full Show Notes Below…
We don’t often talk about land here at Carrot, however, we should! It’s a great option for those who are new to real estate investment and for those looking to diversify or shift their investment strategy. Land deals are typically pretty simple and do not come with the headaches of contractors, repairs, or tenants.
And the sellers are out there, in fact, it’s the third most popular lead type we receive! Here’s how Russ Williams is building a scalable business and how you can too!
Transitioning to Land
Many investors gloss right over land leads because of their low margins and income potential. This is often a mistake as land can prove to be extremely profitable whether it is developed or resold. Plus, it can be a lot less work. Most transactions can be completed remotely, with buyers never even stepping foot on the land before reselling it again. You will not have to pull permits, hire contractors, or worry about expensive holding costs. For Russ, it was these great perks that made moving from residential investments over to land, an easy choice.
The Marketing
Russ gets leads both on and offline. Direct mail does well in his markets as does simply sticking up a “for sale” sign. His letters will include a contract, making it simple for owners to sell right away. Russ was an early adapter here at Carrot and has had a site with us since 2015. When he transitioned to land in 2018, Russ created a stock Carrot site, with very few modifications. He has created some basic city/state landing pages and made sure to upload testimonials after every deal. Over the next year, he plans to hone in on his PPC and evergreen content.
Options With Land
Land allows for different types of contracts and ways for deals to get done. One of those is an option contract which allows the buyer a specified amount of time to buy the property. For the “skinny” deals, Russ will use an option contract, allowing him 3 or so months to buy the property. During that time, he will market the land in an attempt to find a buyer. He will then use the buyer’s funds to close on the property. This helps Russ to maximize his marketing dollars by making some money off of a property he likely wouldn’t have purchased on his own.
Taking Back Your Time
The ultimate goal of many entrepreneurs isn’t to make all of the money, but rather to buy back your time. With its low maintenance, overhead, and hassles, land can be a simple way to build a career in real estate investment. Its simplicity and scalability have allowed Russ to take two months off each summer to spend time with his family – even though through most of his journey he has been a one-man-show. Now Russ is able to scale his business, expand his team, and dive into new markets. It is this type of freedom that we are all looking for within our businesses – and with land investment, you may be able to find that too.
Beau Hollis is the founder of SimplySold in Louisville, Kentucky.
He’s been investing in houses for the past 7 years.
Currently, the majority of his business involves acquisitions that he does himself. He also has an acquisitions person and a full-time videographer.
It’s a low-key, small operation, but it has a high intention, and they go aggressively after deals.
“You know, I spend my time and effort and energy to do this business to provide for my family, not only money but years of my life, getting this up and going to have it, work is worth, the journey is not in vain.”
From Beau’s Carrot leads, his average profit per deal is nearly $40,000.
He’s done $400,000 in assignments in his Carrot site alone in the last six months.
Before using Carrot, he had no online presence and no experience in building websites.
“I had no world tech experience, and I just didn’t have an online presence. I didn’t want to have to build a website. So Carrot made that really easy for me.
Obviously, people cannot find you, people have no clue who you are, they can’t find your business, they don’t know if you’re in business at all, and so if they can’t find you, they can’t do business with you.
So you have no lead flow inbound from a website.”
At first, his vision was to dominate the outbound marketing space, whether it was cold calling, texting, or other things.
However, the lifespan of somebody doing outbound marketing all the time is limited.
“I have come from a background of sales, and I understand that you’re gonna do this one thing all the time, whether it’s cold calling or texting or putting out bandit signs, and there’s a lifespan to that.”
Outbound versus inbound leads are two things that are drastically different. Outbound leads are when you’re seeking out someone. A lot of work, effort, and energy is going into it before you even think about reaching out to the person.
Inbound marketing, or evergreen marketing, is a completely different mindset. You optimize your website with content: videos, blog posts, and testimonials.
Inbound offers a whole other world. People are seeking you out.
The challenge: Creating the path to the world of inbound marketing
This is a business to close deals. Serious real estate agents and investors want to make Evergreen inbound marketing a real avenue, not just a little street but a highway.
Evergreen inbound marketing takes a plan and plenty of patience. It takes a lot of video work on YouTube and on-page SEO with keywords and good content for high rankings.
“My expectation was that I’m just going to turn it on, get it up and live and then it would just bring in the people just saying, please take my house, that’s why I thought it was at the beginning when I first got, I just got it up and I just had, I just had it out there, I didn’t do any kind of optimization. I did zero, absolutely zero customization to the website.”
His website had been just sitting there for a long time. Years.
Then Beau had a conversation with Trevor to get the ball rolling.
He started implementing on his website and using the tools Carrot provides our members. Keyword tracking, campaign tracking, video postings… and over time and hard work, Beau’s inbound marketing started to click.
Once he started optimizing his site, he could see a bit of movement in his rankings.
That movement proceeded forward for a year or two then it was time to dive into the PPC world of inbound marketing. The one-two punch of paid and organic traffic really exploded his business.
In 2021, Beau’s Carrot leads have had an average profit per deal of roughly $40,000.
In comparison, Beau’s outbound leads have had an average profit per deal of roughly half that.
The tools: Carrot features
Although the real estate niche can sometimes be inconsistent, Carrot brings consistency to Beau’s business. He can count on deal flow.
It’s good because when you can count consistent leads, it means that you’re not stressed all of the time.
For Beau, Carrot has become a hub that brings all his inbound marketing efforts together. Since he’s driving traffic from all inbound marketing efforts to his Carrot site, he can track performance across all campaigns and channels, giving him the clarity needed with his marketing.
Here are some of the tools Beau is using to tie together his marketing efforts:
EvergreenTraining Beau needed to get many unqualified outbound leads to close deals. More leads meant more time and expense to sift through the tire kickers.
Automated blogs Carrot’s pre-written automated blog posts have allowed him to stand out in his market as an authority. This saves time and money and puts SimplySold at the forefront of its industry with expert quality content that he can customize for his needs.
Keyword Tracking How do you know if your SEO rankings are climbing? Tracking is easy with Carrot. Simply input the keyword, and we’ll track where that particular term ranks each week, making optimizing accordingly easier!
Campaign Tracking Links Learn how many leads you generate with your ads by following the conversions from them. Easily see which campaigns produce results and create a link to track click-throughs and leads better.
CarrotCamp CarrotCamp is a place where people come to get inspired by other entrepreneurs, hear first-hand stories about how they built their successful businesses and strategies for success. The knowledge Beau has gained from meeting these individuals has been essential in helping him grow his own real estate investing business.
The results:
Beau has been successful in implementing an Evergreen inbound marketing plan. He went all-in and began building his SEO content, which he followed up with PPC. Now he has a team and consistently closes inbound deals to grow his business.
He also knows how to scale his business using Carrot and inbound leads.
What about you? Are you ready for consistent and predictable growth in your business?
Everything in my life from the outside in looked amazing. My friends, family, and colleagues in the industry thought I was an example of “success.”
I owned 3 separate companies, the world’s best family, amazing business partners in 2 of my businesses, and great customers, and felt I could do anything I set my mind to.
The only problem was… I was overwhelmed and unhappy.
In this blog post, I’m going to walk through how I fell into the “too many great opportunities” trap, how it nearly crushed my entrepreneurial and life dreams, and how the advice of a pumpkin farmer changed my perspective on business and life.
Why am I opening up and writing this right now?
First, I wrote this post a few years ago, and a lot has happened since then. Good stuff. We’ve grown Carrot to over 8,000 active members and multiple 7 figures in revenue… and I’ve had to use this process multiple times this past year to clear out the “distraction” and focus on the “big pumpkin.”
So just know… this process I went through a few years ago is one I still use to this day… that’s how much it’s changed my life.
Also…
Now is the perfect time of the year to make some mindset adjustments so you can hit next year hard and make it your best year yet. Also, this one shift in my business has made the single most dramatic impact on my income, fulfillment, and impact on the world of anything I’ve ever done.
This article is for you if you…
Are a high achieving entrepreneur and don’t want to settle for living an average life
Feel like you’re working your butt off but not getting closer to your ultimate goals
You have all kinds of revenue coming in, but your bank account isn’t growing as it should
Find yourself saying “yes” to almost any opportunity that looks “good” and is profitable
Start each day feeling overwhelmed at everything you have to do and the little time you have to do it
You wish that finally one of your businesses or business ideas would grow to its full potential rather than doing “decent” and leveling off
If you’re feeling any of those, you’re not alone.
That Was My Life For 2 Years. Busy. Long Hours. Unfocused. Less Happy. Less Fulfilled.
The frustration that I felt like I was doing all of the right things and I was “successful” in many people’s eyes… but I just never felt that I could crack through to my potential.
It seemed like I’d start a bagillion projects because they all had “promise”, but I would rarely take the important things through the finish line.
I’d always have a backlog of “to-do’s” and always seemed to carry the important “to-do’s” over to the next day for weeks and months on end.
I’d get to the end of the day and feel totally wiped out because I was really “busy,”… but I’d look back on the day and always felt like I couldn’t pinpoint what important project I actually pushed forward in a measurable way that day.
Vision… most of the time, I really couldn’t clearly articulate what I wanted in life and what impact I felt that I was made to make on the world… because I was torn by making a vision too specific that it would alienate some of the “important” projects and businesses I’d already committed my time to… but that didn’t jive with what in my heart I knew i loved to do.
And worse, I felt that the more I took on and the more things I had going in my business and life, the better off I was.
In that life, being “busy” was a good thing, and when people asked how I’ve been my default answer was always…
“Really busy as always!”
… almost like it was a badge of honor to be “busy.”
I Hit A Breaking Point, And Things Had To Change. So Here’s What I Did…
I couldn’t do things like this anymore. You can maybe relate.
If I wanted to live the life I knew I was made to live and to make the impact in life I knew I could make, I had to figure out how to change the way I lived and worked.
Then, a deceptively simple mindset shift helped me break through to a new way of living and thriving in life and business.
I now work less, am focused and excited about the vision, am extremely fulfilled, I’m making more money than I ever have, have an amazing team of A-players around me, and I’m helping more people than I’ve ever been able to help.
Enter the pumpkin farmer.
How A World Record Pumpkin Is Grown (and why it matters to you)
… you have the “busy” and unfocused entrepreneur. Likely you. It used to be me.
That overwhelm, lack of finishing things, achieving below your potential, lower income, always being “busy” but nothing to show for it, etc.
That’s how I was during those 2 years of my life.
I started to see success in my businesses, and that success opened up more and more opportunities.
I didn’t realize it then, but opportunities are often times just distractions in disguise.
Each of those arrows is a different project, focus, or thing… that required my energy and time.
And as you may be able to relate… when you are working on so many things… none of those things can really grow to their full potential.
On the right…
… is what happens when you say “no” to 99% of everything (even things that look like great opportunities) and say YES to just the essential few things that are going to help you make the biggest impact in your life and income.
If you add up the length of all of those little arrows in the first diagram, they equal the length of this one long arrow here. So you’re expending the same amount of energy doing a bunch of unfocused things. None of them do all that well, and you feel like you’re spinning your wheels.
But what if you focused on ONLY THE BEST opportunity and used that same energy to make that great? The results are a factor of 10x+.
As a real estate investor, you may try to wholesale, fix and flip, and do that new townhouse development you’ve got your eye on. They all seem related (all real estate)… but each of them requires your focus, energy, and time.
So unless you build out an amazing team of people, none of those sides of your real estate business will really grow to their full potential like they would if you focused on just one of them… BUT MAKING THAT ONE THING EPICALLY GREAT.
That was the decision I made several years back after I read another book called “The Pumpkin Plan“… that hammered home in a very simple way why it was so critical that I trim stuff down in my life and only focus on a few great things.
Enter The Pumpkin Plan And The Farmer
I’ve found over the years that many of the answers we need in business and life can be learned from farmers.
Farming is a 10,000-year-old discipline, and while technology has changed to help make farming more efficient, the essence of what it takes to grow great crops is the same.
You prep the soil, plant the seeds, water and fertilize those seeds, nurture that crop, and harvest it when it’s ready.
But looking back today, at that time when I was overwhelmed, bringing in good money but spinning my wheels… I was spending too much time planting seeds… I had too many crops out there… and none of my crops had a chance to grow to their full potential because I had to tend to so darn many of them.
But in the book “The Pumpkin Plan,” the author talks about an epiphany he had at a similar point in his life after he read an article in his local newspaper where a state record-holding pumpkin farmer was asked how he grows pumpkins that get so damn big.
How to grow giant pumpkins according to a record-setting pumpkin farmer
Taken from the Pumpkin Plan book. Just do yourself a favor and get the book or get the free PDF of the first chapter online.
And that process has crazy similar parallels in life and business.
Notice in steps 3 – 6 how focused that farmer is on getting rid of everything except that one single pumpkin that seems like it’ll grow the biggest and yield the best result.
He knows that if he keeps marginal pumpkins that are “good opportunities” just in case, they may be great… or so he has ones to fall back on if that big one doesn’t work out… none of those pumpkins would ever have a chance of growing as big as it could.
The “ok” pumpkins or “good” pumpkins kill the chances of the great pumpkin from being amazing…
It’s that focusing all of that water energy, sun energy, and his own personal energy on that one pumpkin that has the most promise that makes the pumpkins so amazingly large.
If we relate this life and business… it may look something like this.
How to grow the best life, business, and income possible (following a farmer’s advice)
Notice the same essential themes from farming to business.
Promising seed = your biggest natural strengths.
Water = selling (gotta make those offers and market the heck out of your business!)
Weed like crazy = cut all distractions and things that pose as “opportunities” but are distractions.
Focus all your attention on the biggest pumpkin = focus on your best and most fulfilling opportunity or strength like crazy.
Most real estate investors and entrepreneurs think that trying 14 different things at once is the path to success.
That “trying” direct mail, SEO, PPC, at the same time, is the path to success.
But it’s not.
Maybe dabble with each of them for a month just to see what gets a bit of traction… but then quickly recognize the one that you feel has the best opportunity to crush it for you if you give it more focus… and weed out the rest of the stuff. Then, focus on being insanely great at PPC.
Then once you’re great at PPC, you may want to add SEO.
Or if you are doing wholesale deals, some fix and flips, or developing an apartment building here or there… you’re likely not doing any of them justice.
What if instead, you recognized that your fix and flip business was the one that was the most fun and most profitable?
Then you’d want to weed out the wholesaling and apartment development and laser focus on being the best fix and flip investor in your area.
Your profits, fun, and fulfillment will all multiply.
Or, if you’re like me, who is a serial entrepreneur… you don’t have to cut off everything else you’re working on and choose just 1 thing.
But you should have 1 main thing that eats up 90%+ of your focus for a period of time.
How I Trimmed The Small Pumpkins
For me, at that moment in my life when I had several companies going on… and people were throwing new opportunities at me all of the time… this is what I did.
I got laser-focused on what my unique abilities were (I love business and marketing strategy, I’m a big vision guy, and love amplifying people to think bigger in life and teaching).
I trimmed off everything in my business that didn’t BEST help me do those things above. This also meant a lot of little projects or partnerships that looked like they were a fit at first glance,but they weren’t a “hell ya! I want to do that!” type of project… just a “ya, I could make money on that.”
There’s a BIG difference. I also started having my assistant check my email so I wouldn’t waste time in my inbox every day… but could focus just on the important emails.
I weeded everything that was taking me away from my focus. At one time, I used to be subscribed to probably 50+ email lists. I’d get dozens of marketing emails daily from “gurus” just in case I’d need them someday or in case they had value. I unsubscribed from all email lists, but my favorite 1-2, turned off Facebook email notifications, deleted the Facebook app from my phone, and deleted the Gmail app from my phone.
I also started not feeling bad if I didn’t answer back an email from someone immediately… because anything that wasn’t directly contributing to my laser focus became a low priority.
I focused on growing that one thing the best I could. That one thing was Carrot. Before making this decision, I had always treated this “online website thing” as a side project. One of my many little projects that had potential that I put a half-ass effort into.
But I started thinking, what if I put all my energy into this and made it an amazing company? What if it was so great I could recruit amazing team members, the ideal customers, and could make my business fun and profitable at the same time… while using it as my way to help the most amount of entrepreneurs as possible?
That’s it.
Sounds too simple right?
Well, it is simple. But it can be hard to take that first step because it feels weird.
It feels like you’re cutting out things that are perfectly fine things that are bringing you money… paying the bills.
But if you don’t get rid of those extra things and if you don’t laser focus on that “big pumpkin”… and give it all of your energy, focus, and resources… you’ll likely be spinning your wheels this time next year.
So You Have A Choice…
And looking back, this choice is pretty obvious now… but it wasn’t easy then.
Choice 1: Focus on what you do best and what you love; focus on that 1 business strategy/opportunity and work it like mad. Grow that 1 thing. And be less busy, make more money, and be happier. Buy The Pumpkin Plan (thanks, Mike!) and Essentialism if you’re serious about it.
And… Listen to Mike Line Out How To Plan Your Business For Less Stress And Higher Profits on His Episode of the CarrotCast:
Choice 2: Keep thinking that “more opportunities” is better. Keep thinking that “being busy” is a good thing. Keep hedging your bets by keeping some of those “small pumpkins” on the table as an option to fall back on and ignore the things your biggest pumpkin needs (your full energy and attention).
And keep settling for your life and a business that runs you.
The choice is yours.
It won’t be comfortable at first, but you’ll look back this time next year and marvel at how your life changed. A simpler life, with more focus and more time to do epic stuff rather than half-assing a dozen things.
Follow that pumpkin farmer’s advice and trim your pumpkin vines often (especially at the end of each year).
Do you feel “busy,” over-extended, and stuck at your current income level?
Also, do you want more content like this? Showing behind the scenes of our entrepreneurial journey as we build a multi-million dollar company from the ground by doing the right thing and delivering an amazing product and experience?
If so, we’ll write a lot more about growing your team, creating a culture in your business, hiring, creating income streams other than real estate, increasing productivity, investing your money wisely, etc. If we get enough interest… we’ll start sharing our journey. Let me know in the comment section below.
Hit me with a comment below on what you think you should trim out before the end of the year?
Our new series is taking you behind the scenes of some of the most interesting and rewarding deals that our customers are closing. Keith Sant is a returning guest, avid Carrot Camper, and a trusted home buyer based in Tacoma, WA.
Today we will learn how he found the lead and how the process went while answering all of your questions about the process. Join us every other Thursday at Carrot.com/deal
Read the Full Show Notes Below…
Keith Sant named his company Kind House Buyers for a reason. As we go behind this deal, you will see why. In this situation, Keith was able to not only go above the asking price but also make over $30k on the deal. Here’s how he did it…
Behind the Deal
The lead came in from a PPC campaign, from someone who was doing their research on buyers in the area. Because Keith had a credible website and a strong reputation, he was one of the buyers she called.
Keith answered the phone when other investors didn’t and he was able to immediately set up an appointment to see the property.
This property was a manufactured home, with plumbing and electrical problems. There was an unpermitted addition, which had also put a lien on the home.
The property could not be listed in the traditional sense, and the family wanted to relocate their aging father who was living on the property.
Breaking Down The Numbers
The family owed about $78k on the property and had also spent a good $10k on family-related issues. Keith knew he could easily sell the land alone for $100k.
After crunching some numbers, he was able to offer more than what they owed, helping to reimburse the family and pay for relocation expenses.
Normally Keith would ear down the property and simply add a new manufactured home, He could then quickly resale it as a brand new home.
However, because of the high demand fr mobile homes, he know this would take a while.
So instead, he flipped the property to a fellow investor who had the tools and means to fix up the property. In this situation, everyone came out ahead.
Building Your Reputation
There are many reasons why homeowners turn to Keith when they need to sell. One of those is the strong reputation he has built over the past 4 years. Keith regularly adds content to his website, adds customer reviews, and is completely transparent about how he works.
Recently, Keith was even feated in an article in the Olympian which spoke of this deal in particular. So many times investors will be painted as vultures who are just after a quick buck.
By being informative and getting his name out there, he is not only building trust but changing the perception of the industry for the better.
If you are putting links out there online and not tracking them, how will you know where your leads are coming from? Our keyword tracking tool will help you see where your leads are coming from and which keywords they are searching.
You will be able to make tweaks to your content to get more eyes on it, thus improving your rankings in Google search results. Look for more data to be added to the keyword tool in the months ahead!
Join Us Live!
Join us every other Thursday on Facebook Live. We’ll be taking you behind the deal with some of the top guys and gals in the industry.
Get answers to your questions live on air while learning the fundamentals of the business.
As you’re planning out your marketing for the year ahead, you might have a couple of questions popping into your mind. You might be asking, how the heck am I going to reach my goals?
You might even be asking what are your goals as a real estate agent or an investor?
What I’m going to be walking through in this video is a simple five-step process, I use it here at our company, and I suggest you use it as an investor and agent as well, to plan out exactly what you need to do in your marketing in the year ahead to be able to reach your goals.
The cool thing about this is, a lot of people, they’ll look at the goals, write a goal number down, it might be an income goal, it might be a deal number goal, and then you pull back and you say, what are the things that are going to help me get there?
You might write down a few different projects, and I ran my businesses like this for years. I’d have a goal, and I’d go to the whiteboard and I’d say, what are some of the cool, exciting, fun things I might need to do this year?
I’d write them down and then that would be my plan. The thing I would forget to do is what I’m going to teach you today, which is mapping down to your marketing channels, so you have an exact clear, ABC step-by-step plan to reach your goals in a fail-safe way.
As soon as I started deploying this in my own businesses and teaching other investors and agents how to do it as well, you start to get more clarity on your plan.
The cool thing is, I actually did a podcast on this, the cool thing is this becomes your strategy. The definition of a strategy basically, is a strategy is as much what not to do, as it is what to do.
What we’re going to be diving into here on my iPad, is we’re going to show you exactly what you should do, so you can say no to so many other things in this year ahead. Work less, gain more freedom, make a greater impact.
Let’s dive into the iPad now.
The first thing I want you to do here is, there are five steps.
The first step is we’re going to set your goal, and if you have to pause this video throughout, as you’re doing your annual planning, or if you’re watching this sometime in the midyear, amazing.
Optimize Your Real Estate Marketing: Step 1
You can still do the same thing if you’re not clear on what you need to do in your marketing to reach your goals as an investor or an agent.
The first step is setting your goal.
Okay, we’re going to pick an income goal, because deal numbers don’t really matter if you’re doing a bunch of low volume or low dollar deals versus if you do some high dollar deals.
I always pick an income number because you can map that to the lifestyle that you want, or the freedom or impact you want to make.
Next, we need to ask what is working? This is a big step a lot of people miss… they set a goal and then they just go, hey, what do I need to do next? We need to first ask what’s working.
Optimize Your Real Estate Marketing: Step 2
I’m going to give you a framework in here for exactly how to track and show what’s working in your business in a crazy, crazy, simple way.
Then what we’re going to say is, what’s the difference between where we currently are to the goal that we’re going for?
Optimize Your Real Estate Marketing: Step 3
I call it the Delta.
Next, we’re going to say cool, now that we know the difference in what we need to make up, what are the biggest opportunities that we see, the one, two, or three max, to be able to hit our goal.
Optimize Your Real Estate Marketing: Step 4
Then last, we’re going to craft the plan in a really crazy simple one-page thing that you can use each and every quarter.
Optimize Your Real Estate Marketing: Step 5
Let’s go back up to the top.
For this example here, I’m going to be working with one of our clients who is an A player. They’ve already started to do some deals. They’re a hybrid agent investor, which is what we specialize here in at Carrot.
The people who have their license, and their investor who can offer cash offers, maybe even flip homes. This person’s been doing deals for two or three years, and they want to get to a $750,000 profit goal.
Okay, so that’s a big goal. If you are trying to get to your first $100,000, it doesn’t matter.
Next what we’re going to do, is I want you to write down every marketing channel that you’re currently using to get leads and to close deals.
You might be doing referrals as an agent, or you might be big, big, big on cold calling as an investor agent, whatever it is, write down the channels that generated your leads in deals this past 12 months.
If you have to hit pause in this video, go ahead and do it. Write down the channels on the left side and come back.
Next, I want you to pull back into your data. This might be one of those things where you might be going, I don’t know what the channels did, but one of the biggest keys that you can do as a marketer is you have to know and have clarity on what each marketing channel is doing for your business.
One of the biggest mistakes that I find with people is they end up investing $5000, $10,000, $15,000 a month, and they say, I’m getting deals out of this, but I don’t know which channels are working and which channels aren’t working.
So they keep on putting more and more money into the marketing, not knowing which half of their marketing’s working and not.
This is going to help you save tens of thousands of dollars potentially in marketing every year, and help you grow your income in a more predictable way with less work, which is what we’re about here at Carrot. Helping you get more freedom.
What I want you to do next, is now write down what are your leads. How many leads did you get with that channel?
Real Estate Marketing Channels: Leads
In this example, we’re going to say the SEO channel got 115 leads this past 12 months, Google PPC, 75 Facebook Ads, 63, you get the idea. Write those down.
Then we’re going to say with each channel, how many deals came out of those?
Real Estate Marketing Channels: Deals
Now you might be saying, I don’t know how to track how many deals came from the channels.
Well, what we can do is if you’re using a system like Carrot, our system will actually tell you which leads came from SEO. It’ll tell you which leads came from a Facebook ad, or from a Google ad. It’ll tell you all of those things.
Now you’ll be able to know which leads and deals came from direct mail and cold calling because you want to use a different tracking phone number with each one of those marketing methods.
You can always say if anyone called from this phone number, it’s from my direct mail, so you can track the leads and deals.
Okay, now what I want you to do is dive even deeper.
Real Estate Marketing Channels: Cost per Deal
If you’re looking at this going, man, I don’t have this data.
What I want you to know is number one, it’s simple data to track so you can get it, but number two, this is critical data if you want to grow your business, work less, make a greater impact.
With each one of the channels, say, I’ve got 115 leads at the SEO this past year, 12 deals out of it. How much did you invest in doing SEO that year? Did you pay someone to do it? Did you do it yourself?
Just take the entire amount of money you invested in the SEO that year and divide it by the number of deals that you did. In this case, we’re just going to say it was about $600 a deal, which was the average cost when we took that amount.
If it was Google pay-per-click or direct mail same thing, take the entire cost of what you spent on direct mail this year, Google pay-per-click this year, or cold calling, or whatever it is, and then divide it by the number of deals you got to come up with your cost per deal.
This can be an important number.
Next, it’s the profit per deal. Do the same thing. Look at the lead sources. What were the profits on those?
Real Estate Marketing Channels: Profit per Deal
What were the total profits for the year for that channel, divided by how many deals you did, and fill out the profit per deal column.
We’re going to end up coming up with these numbers down here in this section down here which is… what was our total profit for the year?
If we add those up, our total gross profit in this example is about $439,000.
If we take out the cost for those deals, let’s say it was about $401,000. We netted $401,000, that’s amazing. That’s a huge huge year.
If your goal is $750,000, and we currently brought in about $439,000, the difference between those two numbers is $348,000, about $350,000.
That’s the Delta we’re trying to make up in this next year with our plan.
I’m going to show you guys exactly how to do that in about three to five more minutes in this video.
The next step I want you to take here, is with each one of your channels, now the way that we decide what we need to do in the year ahead, is we look at each channel and we ask ourselves, let’s kind of give it a grade rating, an A through an F.
An A means we’re executing it insanely well, and there’s probably no room for growth in this channel. We’ve maximized the channel.
If you’re doing SEO, and you’re just in one market, and you’re dominating Google for all of your keyword phrases, you’re ranked number one in Google for all your keyword phrases, that’s probably going to be an A.
There’s probably not a lot of room for improvement there if you’re dominating ranking number one in Google for all of your phrases.
If you’re not ranking number one in Google for all of your phrases, you’re number six, number seven, number eight, you might be getting a couple of leads here or there, maybe that’s a C.
Okay, give yourself whatever that rating is. Do the same thing with all of those.
I’m just going to make up some numbers here. Let’s say we’re a B with Google PPC. It’s working pretty good.
Let’s say direct mail, we’re a D on that, we tested it out, but we’re not really doing too great. Let’s say cold calling is an F, we got one deal, but man it wasn’t predictable. Let’s say, this is a B on the Facebook ads.
What we’re doing is we’re asking ourselves, where do we see an opportunity for growth? If it’s an A, we’re saying we’re doing the best we can possibly do, expanded it at the best we possibly could, there’s no opportunity for growth.
If it’s an F, it means we definitely haven’t maximized it, so it might be on the docket there okay.
Now, let’s say Google pay-per-click and Facebook ads look awesome, and then I really want to get this direct mail thing working better, so I’m going to go I see an opportunity for growing Facebook or Google pay-per-click.
Let’s say direct mail number two, and Facebook number three. If I think that there’s a lot of room for growth and we have the skillset to do so.
Okay, I’m going to come down here now, with what we had just done with those ratings. We’re going to rate those out, and now we’re going to come up with some new goals for these.
Let’s say the Google PPC, what we had been doing in the past was 75 leads, let’s say we want to increase that now and grow that to 150 leads.
We want to double this so we can help to start to make up that Delta of about $350,000.
We know with Google pay-per-click that we’re closing about one in 10 leads into a deal that gives us $20,000.
That was six deals, now if we can double our Google pay-per-click if we see opportunity there, because we haven’t really stepped into it too much, or we can expand our keywords, that’s going to then take it to 12 deals.
Let’s say the cost per deal stays about the same, and the profit per deal stays about the same.
Now that’s going to make it to, rather than us bringing in about a $120,000 in Google pay-per-click that year, that’s going to bring in far more, that’s going to bring in, shoot, about $240,000 with Google pay-per-click that year.
I’m just going to delete that puppy and let’s make this the goal.
Let’s say $240,000 total is what we’re going to bring in, and we’re going to bring in $120K extra.
What we’re determining is how are we going to make up this Delta of $348,000 bucks? Well, now we’ve made up right there $120,000 of it with the Google side of it.
Now let’s look at Facebook. If we closed three deals last year from Facebook, and an average of about $20,000 profit per deal, how many more deals do we think we can get out of Facebook?
How many more leads do we think?
Can we double that? I don’t know. That’s for you to determine, go talk to someone who’s an expert, or you dive into it. Let’s say this doubles to six, and that goes from $60,000 to $120,000 now.
It goes from $60,000 to $120,000 now, and that is in total. So the extra, the Delta that we’re adding is another $60,000. $120,000 plus 60, that’s about $180,000. You guys know where I’m going with this, right?
Now let’s say direct mail. We see a lot of opportunities. We just did one test and we want to expand it out. Let’s say we want to take this and see if we can’t expand this to 10 deals this year. We want a 5x this year.
How many leads do we need to get the whole thing? I’m not going to do all the math here, but you guys see where I’m going with this.
The things that we want to focus on here, doing some quick behind-the-scenes math, is we want to figure out what channels do we need to expand it by, how much do we need to expand them to get to this number here? The $348,000 bucks.
We’re going to speed up through TV time, and now let’s assume that we had picked our three or four channels, we’d worked the numbers and we have a plan.
Let’s say the number one plan is the Google pay-per-click.
We worked the numbers. We say, I think there’s more opportunity there, maybe we can bump this to 200 leads, and maybe we can bump this to 15 deals, and that’s a couple of extra deals. That’s $160,000, $170,000 there. Bam we found out our plan.
Q1 now, I want you guys to do this.
Pick one new idea per quarter and two improvements per quarter. One thing that we oftentimes do is plan way too many projects. Just start one new thing per quarter, and two improvements per quarter.
This here might be a new idea of direct mail. We barely dabbled in direct mail. We’re going to launch a new direct mail campaign. That’s the big new thing we’re going to do this year.
Improvement number one is we’re going to expand Google PPC into the second market.
That’s our improvement. We’re going to expand there. Improvement number two might be expanding Facebook’s audience.
Then our goal, if our total goal is $348,000 in extra revenue, and our total goal for the year is $750,000. If we divide that out, how much money, how much revenue do we need to bring per quarter?
I’m just going to grab my fancy calculator here really fast and show you guys this last little thing and we’ll wrap this video, and you’ll have a plan essentially. $750,000 divided by four equals $187,000 a quarter. $187,500 a quarter; $187,500.
Real Estate Marketing Channels: Craft Your Plan
You don’t have to make these all exactly the same per quarter, you can make them so you ramp up or whatever you want to do. It’s your plan. Each quarter I’m going to be planning out this.
Then we say, hey our goal is $187,500 per quarter. You can break it down per month, and then you say, okay how much of this is going to come from our direct mail campaign?
How much of it’s going to come from our expansion of Google pay-per-click and Facebook ads.
Then spend the next 10, 15, 30 minutes going, if we did those in the first quarter, what do we need to do in the second quarter?
It might be launching something else new here. It might be hiring an employee over here because now you’re having more leads.
It might be now getting a dispositions manager or something like that. It might be adding Carrot in here is that big new project.
Then each quarter you pick two things you can improve, one thing you can grow on that’s brand new.
All right, guys. Let me recap this right now, block out about an hour to two hours possibly, as you’re heading into this next year, and this can help you get insane clarity in exactly what you need to do with your real estate marketing as an investor or agent.
The first thing is you pick your revenue goal for the year. The second thing is you break out a scorecard like this that I’m showing you on the iPad, and ask what is working and break it down by channel.
Dig into those numbers. If you don’t have them you really need them to grow.
Then figure out what your profits are, and ask yourself what’s the difference between my goal and what I did this past year?
Next, we need to say, what’s our greatest opportunity? We need to kind of grade our channels. An A is you’re doing the best you could possibly do, no more room for growth. An F is it’s terrible, and there might be room for growth.
Then craft your quarterly plan, one new thing, two improvements per quarter, and then map those to your scorecard, which would be bringing in $187,500 per quarter or whatever your number is.
Guys and gals, we’re going to have some amazing resources for you that are going to help you to do your planning better, that is going to help you to grow your business better.
If you’re looking to expand your evergreen marketing and buy back more of your time, go to Carrot.com/evergreen, and check out our latest webinar on this topic so you can step into evergreen marketing, win more leads that are the highest margin, highest profit deals while you’re stacking your marketing with your other channels.
Guys have an amazing rest of the week, plan your marketing, hit it hard, but buy back your time this year.
We’ve been getting some awesome questions from the Carrot community lately so we’re going to be answering some of them here on the blog in detailed posts to help you get an edge on your competition with your real estate investing website.
The other day, one of our members from Indianapolis (one of the top turn-key rental property sellers in Indianapolis) asked…
“Hey Jake, good morning, in general, are there less real estate investor leads in holiday months then in the summer months?” Francisco
(NOTE: This customer is in our Content Pro plan and saw their first leads in their market within the first 2 weeks after launching their sites and implementing a few critical steps.)
We’ve monitored this trend over the years while also monitoring search levels on many of the top motivated sellers, cash buyers, private lenders, and tenant search phrases out there.
Now… each type of searcher came up with slightly different seasonal search patterns…. so in this post, we’ll run through some of what we found so you can better prepare for fewer November and December lead volumes when leveraging SEO and traditional Google PPC specifically for motivated property seller leads and cash buyers.
So… Are There Less Real Estate Investor Leads In Holiday Months Than Summer Months?
When Are Motivated Property Sellers Searching Google?
First, let us look at the highest searched highly motivated real estate seller search phrase, “we buy houses”.
Average Monthly Searches Of The Motivated Seller Search Phrase “we buy houses”
Average “we buy houses” Searches In Google Per Month: Notice the big ramp-up of searches in the summer and spring months. What’s this mean?
That’s really interesting… but that doesn’t tell the whole story. So we took the average of the top 25 motivated seller keyword phrases to see overall… is there a seasonality for motivated sellers hopping online and searching for someone to buy their house.
The graph below shows the average of the top 25 search phrases in the United States for highly motivated sellers on Google across the past 24 months.
Average Monthly Searches Of The Top 25 Motivated Real Estate Seller Search Phrases
Average Monthly Searches In The Past 24 Months: Highly motivated sellers searches on Google trend up in the warm months and down in the colder months… with December being the lowest each year.
We see a similar ramp up in the warm months… and the number of motivated sellers searching Google with the common highly motivated search phrases dips in the winter months.
On average… the summer months are getting nearly 30% more searches from motivated sellers than November and December.
Now, we did cross-check this to make sure it wasn’t a “cold winter climate” vs. “mild winter climate” thing… and overall we still saw very very similar trends. So, for now, we’ve ruled out the climate being the major contributing factor to the seasonality of the motivated seller searches.
Why Do Fewer Motivated Property Sellers Search Google In November And December?
There are lots of reasons that could be causing this… but here are a few of my guesses…
It’s COLD! (in lots of places) so they want to hang out
It’s the holidays and people don’t have the time to deal with something else or don’t want to disrupt the holidays
Generally, there are fewer properties on the market in general so many house sellers feel that “selling in the spring” is what you’re supposed to do to sell a house fast (even though some data shows houses that sell in the winter sell for higher prices and sell quicker)
When Are Cash Buyers Of Real Estate Searching Google?
Overall a cash buyer is in a different mindset than a highly motivated seller. Usually, a person who’s looking to buy investment property tends to look for properties when they are thinking about their financial future.
There is a bit of seasonality to cash property buyer searches as well. Fewer searches for the top 20 cash property buyer searches on Google in November and December than most of the other months during the year… but one key thing to take note of, if you’re selling investment properties or just looking to grow your cash buyers list in a bit way… is the single most searched month in the whole year is January.
Average Monthly Searches Of The Top 20 Investment Property / Cash Buyer Search Phrases
January Is The Single Most Searched Month For Cash Buyers: This chart from Google search data shows January beating out all other months during the year for investment property buyers looking online for properties. What are you doing to get ready to build your cash buyers list in a big way in January?
That’s pretty darn cool (and useful) eh?
Find Seasonal Opportunities
It shouldn’t be surprising that the real estate industry has seasonal patterns. To validate this… according to Realtor.com, homes are most popular in the summer months when people have their minds set on moving because it’s a peak season for inventory and sales.
But, the winter months should not be discounted. For example, wintertime can provide a unique opportunity for investors because they know people want their houses sold fast!
Winter Pro: Serious Sellers
Winter is known to be the most profitable season for buyers. When it’s cold outside and snowing, there are many more “serious” sellers who want their home sold quickly so they can get on with life in warmer weather; conversely, this means that you’ll find some motivated sellers right when you need them.
Winter Con: Low Lead Volumes
Winter weather can be a major factor in the real estate cycle. Cold weather, including elements of rain and snow, can make it more difficult to find sellers. This can have an impact on the buying and selling process, as the limited potential sellers may have an overappreciated value of a home in cold months.
What This All Means
What this means to me is that people are looking at their financial goals at the start of the year and saying… “Man, I need to get my butt in gear and pick up some more investment properties to hit my goals this year”… so they dive in right after the holidays and start looking for properties.
There may also be tax reasons that people are waiting until January to kick up their investment property search… either way… the data shows it’s the case… so now it’s time to act on it.
So, if you know the single most popular month for investment property searches online is January each year… what are you doing to build your own cash buyer list for your real estate investing business?
What Can You Do To Prepare Your Real Estate Investing Business For Seasonal Search Trends?
Really, what this data shows is that there are seasonalities to the real estate investor leads you can expect from SEO for real estate investing and even PayPerClick marketing.
So keep these things in mind as you’re generating leads for your real estate investing business through your website…
Winter months for both investment property buyers and motivated house sellers bring in lower volumes than the summer months (but not drastically lower… at the least… maybe 30% lower on motivated seller leads)
Now is the perfect time to start your Evergreen marketing campaigns if you haven’t already so your real estate investing websites rank higher in Google for keywords that matter when the spring and summer come around
If possible, try not to rely strictly on SEO or PPC for your only lead generation if you’re not in a larger market in the winter months if possible… so your marketing plan is well rounded and you’re getting leads coming in from places other than just the internet in slower lead months.
Get a cash buyer/investment property buyer campaign rolling asap so you can take advantage of the highest searched month of the year for people looking for investment properties. How? Start your Craigslist marketing… go to your REI club in January and start getting your buyers’ list built there… kick on some Google PPC campaigns if you have a bit of a budget to invest… Facebook ad campaigns are doing REALLY well to generate investment property buyers and tenant buyers… basically… get focused and leverage the January cash buyer traffic!!!
If you’re a Carrot member, you know how well the Cash Buyer websites on our system are converting… so put it to use.
Also, on the motivated seller side of things… having a real estate investing website with a high conversion rate(how many people land on your website and become a lead) is as important as ever in months with lower search volumes like December… so if your current website isn’t converting like it should… take a look at Carrot to see if it’s a fit for you.
We’re the only company in the industry as focused on results and increasing conversions on our platform each and every month as much as we are… so you can just focus on growing your business… not fiddling with building websites and trying to learn conversion rate optimization in your “spare” time.
Hit me with comments or questions below! And leverage these seasonalities in the Google searches to your advantage!!!!
If you’re a wholesaler or a real estate agent that’s looking for motivated sellers, I’m going to show you how to grow your real estate business into multiple markets, get leads for $20 to $30 per lead and cut your Google pay per click ad costs by 50% to 75% by going regional or national in this video right here.
So guys and gals, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking with one of our clients that they were pulling in leads from Google pay per click for somewhere between $20 to $30 bucks a lead.
Now, you can even, I’ve heard stories of $10 bucks a lead, $50 bucks a lead, the whole thing.
The thing they did was they went from just being a local investor or local hybrid agent investor, looking for sellers in one market, to they expanded to national.
So, now they’re using their Carrot website for national lead generation.
So, what I’m going to do in this video is I’m going to walk you through it. We’re going to dive into my iPad.
I will show you how to go from a local website with Carrot to regional or statewide.
And then if you wanted to expand to national, they’re all completely different business models, so I’m not saying that you should do it because you have to then figure out, of course, all the different moving parts of how to turn those leads into deals, how to analyze deals in different markets, the whole thing.
We’re not going to cover that in this video. We’ll cover that in some other videos. But let’s dive into the iPad because we’re going to show you exactly how to set up your Carrot website, depending on whether you’re local, regional, state, or national.
Let’s dig in.
How to Grow Your Real Estate Business Into Multiple Markets
So, we’re right here on the iPad. The very first thing, this is where most of our clients are, most of our clients are in the local bucket. Meaning, you’re in one market, you’re in Cincinnati, you’re in Tampa, you’re in Roseburg, Oregon. You’re in Phoenix, Arizona.
Single Market Real Estate Website Strategy
Of course, the bigger the city, the more opportunity there is to pull more and more leads out of the city because the population’s higher.
So, in a single city market, your website’s pretty much going to look like this. You’re going to have your homepage right here and it’s going to be, “Sell your house in city.”
Pretty much those types of phrases. Over here, you’re going to have your standard, what we call authority hub pages, which is your “sell a house” page.
It’s going to have a call to action on it. Your “how it works” page. Reviews page with testimonials to build trust and credibility, maybe some FAQ, and then you’re about page and contact pages. That’s what we call the core conversion pages here at Carrot.
To be in one city, that’ what you need.
That’s pretty much all that you need.
You can use our tools and systems then add automated blog posts, or to use our video post feature, to build further trust and credibility. But that’s how you would lay it out.
Your homepage is focused on the city at that point, sell your house fast in Cincinnati. And then you would talk about that, show Cincinnati pictures.
Your location pages might be set up for different keywords in that city. So, maybe you set up a location page for cash home buyers in the city, or sell your inherited house in Cincinnati. That’s how you’d leverage that.
So, let’s say now that we wanted to expand out beyond that one location. If you’re in a city, you can pretty much expect somewhere between 10 and 30 leads a month once you get the SEO and/or Google pay per click launched in that one area.
It depends on the population and your market.
If you’re in a 10,000 person city, then you’re probably going to be maybe three, four, five leads a month from Google PPC or SEO.
If you’re in a two million person population market, you might be able to get 30 to 50 leads a month, if you’re ranking really in Google and doing some Google Ads.
Regional or State Website Strategy
So, now we’re going to move into the regional or state set up on your website.
Statewide Real Estate Website Strategy
The regional or state set up on your website is basically going to be kind of like this, the only real core differences are your homepage now, your homepages focus on the state.
So, rather than your homepage focus on just one city, we’re going to focus on the entire state or the entire region that you operate in.
If you’re in the entire state of Texas and you have four prime cities, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston, as an example, then you’re going to have your homepage be, “Sell your house fast in Texas,” basically.
Then you’re going to have pictures that have a broad array of pictures of the different markets that you buy houses in, or that you’re a real estate agent and/or an investor in.
Then down at the bottom of your website, you’re going to have a link to your prime cities in that state.
You might link up to five, six, seven, eight of your cities to those city location pages.
Over on the left side, those are what we call location pages. So, you’re going to set up a new page for every single location or every single city in that state. Sell my house fast, Dallas. Sell my house fast, San Antonio. Sell my house fast, Katy, Texas. Whatever those cities are.
City Location Page Strategy
I want you to focus on just looking at those on a quarterly basis. Every quarter, do I need to add any new city pages or location pages within this state?
Now, let’s say you’re in three, or four, or five states. You’re in a region. Your homepage would then be, “We buy houses in the tri-state area,” or look for tri-state investment properties.
Then on the homepage, talk about the three states you do business in and maybe some of your primary cities. Then you would create pages for states and cities.
Some advantages here, your homepage is focused on the state. You can start to rank really well at the state level and at the city level.
Location pages for each city, like I said, now you can get those rankings in Google for each city. Your URL is going to look kind of like this, whatever it is .com, forward slash, sell your house in X, Y, Z city.
Your PPC, this is where is where the lead costs get lower. If you’re marketing, doing Google PPC in just one market, your PPC cost is going to be the most it can possibly be because you don’t have a very broad targeting there.
The broader you’re targeting, the lower your click cost tends to be.
But once you start to get down in here into the state and region, and you’re marketing a wider audience, your PPC gets cheaper and your SEO momentum actually grows because now you’re setting up multiple pages in multiple cities, the 10th location page, 11th, 12th, 15th, ninth, whatever it is.
As you built up the SEO and your overall domain name, each one of those is going to rank in Google faster and faster and faster.
So, a lot of people ask, should I set up multiple websites? Should I have a website for every city?
And my suggestion is, if it’s all for motivated house sellers and you are okay with having one unified brand that will work well in all those cities, then I would suggest setting up the one motivated house seller website that encompasses all of those cities because the SEO juice is going to feed into every location page you create, and they’re going to rank faster and quicker.
National Website Strategy
So, now let’s say you want to go to the national.
National Real Estate Website Strategy
We have a lot of our clients using Carrot to do national house buying, national investment property websites, things like that.
The main difference that you’re going to do here is your homepage now is going to be more generic.
So, rather than sell your house fast in Cincinnati or sell your house fast in Ohio, now it’s going to be “sell your house fast”, “how to sell your house fast for cash”, or “we will make you a cash offer on your home.”
Then on that homepage, you’ll talk about that “we buy all around America” and then you might have a link to maybe some of your primary markets that you buy in.
Link up to some of those states or some of the cities that are the primary markets that you buy in.
Now what we’re going to do with our location pages is this, instead of creating location pages for a city at the root level, we’re going to create location pages for each of your primary states.
State Landing Page Strategy
Let’s say you’re a national buyer, but you focus on 10 states. Create a location page for each one of those states. It could be “sell my house fast Florida”, or sell my house fast Georgia.” Basically, it’s “sell my house fast, insert state.”
Now what you’re going to do is create city pages for each one of those states, which are the primary cities in the state that you buy in.
If it’s Florida and your primary cities are Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville. You’re going to create a Jacksonville page, sell my house fast in Jacksonville. For Orlando, you’re going to create an Orlando page, sell my house fast in Orlando. You’re going to do the same thing for Tampa.
Those would be underneath the state of Florida. This is what it would look like over here on the URL. It’d be your site .com, forward slash whatever that state is.
So, that’d be Florida, forward slash Florida, and then forward slash sell my house fast Tampa.
That would be the name of that page, sell my house fast Tampa. The name of that page would be Florida, or sell your house in Florida. That is your structure.
Your PPC gets the cheapest here with this strategy. Now, this is where you’re going to start to get your $20 cost per lead. Your $30 cost per lead. Your $50 cost per lead in Google, in the exact same markets, that before you might have been paying $80 bucks, a hundred bucks, $150, $200 per lead in the exact same market.
You might be saying, “Why is that? Why does the cost per lead in Google Ads get so much cheaper?” Or even Facebook if you go broader. Because you’re targeting a wider audience and when you target a wider audience, Google actually has more data to feed back into your campaign to get your click costs and lead costs lower.
Your SEO scales way faster too.
If you already have 10 20, 30 location pages, and you have some SEO juice on your website.
When you set up that new page and that new market, it’s going to get ranked really, really fast, because you’ve already done all of this work.
Creating this amazing national website with the state pages and the city pages, and you’re eight months in, a year in, two years in.
Google loves your site. They see you as an authority, it’s got some great link juice. Every single page ranks faster now.
At this level (national), you can expect 100 to 1,000 leads a month, depending on how well you’re doing the marketing. At the state and the region, you can expect between 30 and a hundred leads a month. Of course, depending on how well you’re doing your marketing and SEO and PPC.
Recap: How to Grow Your Real Estate Business Into Multiple Markets
Let me recap real quick.
The best way to expand from local to national is to create a new cadence or new setup with your location pages.
You go city and then state, and then also you start to scale out your Google Ads. Because as you scale out your Google Ads to more states, more locations, they get cheaper and cheaper.
And that’s how the big lead generation services do it. That’s how our biggest clients do it and get way more leads at a way cheaper cost because they’re going national.
Check out our other videos in this series and on our YouTube channel.
Hit the subscribe button on our YouTube channel because every single month, we put out new content that teaches you how to be an investor or an agent, or a hybrid investor agent, and generate more leads more consistently in an evergreen fashion on the internet.
You can finally get more freedom, finally, make a greater impact with your business. Go to carrot.com/evergreen to check out our webinar on the topic of evergreen marketing. If you enjoyed this video, we’re going to dive way deeper into that training.
Go to carrot.com/evergreen. Have an amazing rest of the week, like and subscribe to this video, we’ll see you in the next video.
A lot of times when you prejudge people or their current situations, you just look at the outside. You can lose a deal quickly by judging what you see.
– Beau Hollis
The “56k Profit Moldy House” Deal | Behind the Deal
Welcome to another episode of behind the deal. This is where we take you inside of an actual deal, covering all of the details from start to finish.
In this Livestream, we were back with Beau Hollis to learn about the marketing, follow-up, and specifics that went into this particular deal.
In this episode, Beau walks us through the world’s moldiest house. You’ll see exactly how he found this deal and how he walked away with a $56k profit.
Be sure to join us every other Thursday when we go behind the deal live on Facebook and Youtube.
Read the Full Show Notes Below…
Beau has been a friend here at Carrot for a long time. He recently walked us through a deal in which he bought a car right along with a house.
This deal was quite a bit different. Most investors would run from a moldy house, but by offering the solution to a difficult situation made this a great deal for everyone involved.
Here’s how it went down…
The Lead
The lead came through a Carrot PPC ad at around 6 in the morning. It was a divorce situation in which each spouse had moved on and was living separately.
There was a teenage son living in the home, but Beau was assured he’d be able to find other accommodations if the deal went through.
The Follow Up
Almost immediately, Beau was on the phone with the owner and setting an appointment to see the home. She wasn’t local, but Beau was still able to arrange to see the house at 1 pm that same day.
One of the reasons Beau is able to close 20-30 deals a month is because of his prompt follow-up.
What Made This Deal Unique
Aside from the basement being filled with mold, Beau had to negotiate this deal over the phone. As someone accustomed to belly-to-belly sales, not seeing the person face to face made things feel more challenging.
Luckily, when dealing with inbound leads, the motivation is typically much higher than with outbound leads. In fact, by 1 o’clock that same day, Beau had this house under contract.
The Numbers
Beau bought the home for $125k and was able to sell it for $182k. The house was worth about $240k so after the end buyer remedied the mold situation, they were still able to flip it for a $30k profit.
This is another shining example of how a property investor can remedy a problem, helping everyone to come out ahead.
Tips That Actually Work: Campaign Tracking Links
Because of campaign tracking links, Beau was able to see exactly where his lead came from, Google Ads.
What are campaign tracking links?
Campaign tracking links allow you to see exactly how many people click on the links you put out on the internet?
For example, you can see how many people click the links in your email signature. Or, in Beau’s case, his Google Ads account.
Carrot’s platform allows you to create a unique link for any piece of content on your site.
Whenever this link is clicked it records the data in your account (if someone turned into a lead or not).
This feature can increase your ROI by 10x if you know what is working and where you should be spending your budget.
