How a Former Touring Musician-Turned-Copywriter Landed His First Agency Client with One Facebook Post

“People think you need thousands of visitors. What matters is that the right person finds you and the site makes it easy for them to reach out.”

How many different careers have you had?

Mike Connolly spent time as a touring musician, sales rep for Denver’s biggest insulation contractor, real estate investor, freelance copywriter, and land flipper.

It’s been a winding road, but every stop taught him the same lesson from a different angle: how to turn attention into leads. Today, he puts that to work two ways: finding deals for his own real estate business, and helping local business owners do the same through his marketing agency.

Putting the Pieces Together

“I wanted to be a songwriter like Bob Dylan. Copywriting was the closest thing.”

After the Great Recession in 2008 wiped away Mike’s 22-door real estate portfolio, he fell back on his first passion — storytelling.

“When I left the real estate world, that was the first thing I did: I hung out my shingle [to be a copywriter]. I had no idea what I was doing,” he laughed.

He launched Boulder SEO Group “mostly just to prove to myself and prospective clients I had some SEO chops,” offered copywriting services via StrategiCopy, and spent over a decade as a Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) Certified Partner, helping Keap’s customers with their copywriting needs. 

While he had steady freelancing work, he wasn’t finding the success on his own that he hoped for. So he decided to transition back to real estate. 

“I actually had a massive marketing funnel and campaign that totally bombed. In the process of winding that down, I met a marketing agency that has a lot of real estate investor clients. I said, ‘How about you build some real estate sites for me.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it in Carrot.’ That’s how I got introduced to Carrot.”

That’s where Mike discovered the power of a Carrot website for lead generation. He launched his Carrot sites (Eagleview Land Sales, Cash For Your Vacant Land, and RealPro HomeBuyers) in 2023 and is impressed with the results.

“I have 3 Carrot websites. The land website in particular has done quite well for me this year.”

His Carrot-built land-buying site, CashForYourVacantLand.com, has become his proof of concept. It isn’t a high-traffic site, averaging about 31 visitors a month. But it converts. Those visitors turn into roughly 2.7 seller leads a month — an 8.7% conversion rate.

Over the past six quarters, those leads produced five closed deals, netting $31,367 after closing costs and agent fees, or about $6,270 per deal. 

“People think you need thousands of visitors. I get about one a day. What matters is that the right person finds you and the site makes it easy for them to reach out. That’s the story I can share with contractors looking for a cost-effective way to get more ‘right-fit’ leads.”

When someone recommended he check out CarrotAgency — a local search marketing platform that helps agencies support home service providers and other small businesses with online lead generation and AI search visibility — it made sense to him. Since he already owned the domain, Mike decided to relaunch Boulder SEO Group.

“Homeowners are starting to ask ChatGPT and Google’s AI who to call. Most contractors I look at are invisible there, even the ones with hundreds of five-star reviews. That’s the gap I’m going after in my own real estate investing business, as well as for my marketing consulting clients.”

“It seems like a good fit for my background as a marketer and my experience in insulation sales to builders and homeowners,” he explained. “Also, with my experience getting profitable leads through my Carrot land seller website, I figured I already have case studies as proof.”

CarrotAgency is the perfect marriage of all his past experience. He’s able to put his marketing and copywriting experience to work and deeply understands the real estate and home services industries — the exact industries Carrot websites are designed to help.

“Everything just kind of came back together.”

His time at Keap also introduced him to a wider range of businesses. While he might not have known it at the time, this experience would ultimately give him the confidence to work with companies in any industry. 

“I had served literally dozens of small businesses in every industry, from organic herbal teas to heavy equipment leasing in Australia. I had so much experience in so many different industries.”

Launching an Agency

That experience and confidence came in handy when he landed his first client. Despite initially targeting “high ticket, Colorado Front Range contractors with a good reputation and average revenues of at least $50k a month,” Mike’s first client ended up being a commercial kitchen hood cleaning business in Phoenix, AZ.

This lead came from a simple Facebook post to his network — a trick he learned from the CarrotAgency Accelerator program, taught by Carrot CEO Trevor Mauch. At first, Mike was skeptical it would work.

“I have a very random, chaotic, scattered media presence, so I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be really useless, but I’ll do it because I’m going to do what Trevor says to do.’ So I did, I posted the message.”

“A couple of days went by and Cory reaches out to me. Cory is a guy I worked with during our Infusionsoft days. I hadn’t been in touch with him for years. I didn’t even know that he was following me on Facebook. I get this DM from him that said, ‘I have need.’ I thought it was a spam message at first, honestly. But it turned out he did.”

The site launched on time, about 30 days after Cory and Mike signed a contract. Mike used the Carrot website framework to build a site that performs well now, but specifically added room to grow when his client is ready to expand to new locations. Despite originally thinking he’d work with Colorado-based businesses, he didn’t find the distance challenging.

“I did the whole thing from right here in my office [in Colorado]. I didn’t need to be in Arizona. It wasn’t a problem at all to do it long distance.”

More importantly, his client is happy.

“He’s delighted with the site and sent me an unsolicited testimonial about how he feels about it and working with me.”

Expanding Boulder SEO Group’s Client Base

This early success got Mike thinking about the best way to generate leads for his marketing agency. He’s tried cold calling, but calls it “a tough game.” 

“I’ve had some results, but it’s slow going.”

Instead, he’s starting with people who already know and trust him; people like Cory, or folks in the various communities he’s active in who may know a contractor who could use help getting up to speed with their AI visibility.

“Clients come from communities that you’re actively involved in,” he said. “[Cory is] somebody who was definitely not in a niche that I was going after. The niche I was going after is roofers, HVAC, general contractors. Those are the three that I see [working with most] in my local area in Boulder, CO. And here’s somebody totally out of the blue and not something I would have thought of. But the lesson is, it’s about community. It’s about your warm list, people who know you. That’s the place to start with this.”

It also sharpened how Mike thinks about niching. He’s still focused on home service contractors — roofers, HVAC, plumbers — for his marketing agency because that’s where his sales background and his playbook line up. Cory’s business didn’t change that. It showed him that a niche tells you who to market to, not where your first client will come from. That came from people who already knew and trusted him.

“This whole question about niching, does it really matter that you target a particular niche? That’s a question that certainly tortures me a little bit. Honestly, I was targeting a niche, and it worked out just great that [my first client] was totally out of the niche. The lesson there is that the relationship is really what matters. It’s not so much your concept of the type of thing you’re supposed to be doing.”

Building Skills & Gaining Confidence

As he builds his client base, Mike is taking time to learn more and dive deeper into Carrot’s website and SEO capabilities. He started by joining the CarrotAgency Accelerator — an 8-week training program that walks new agencies through finding clients, building their pricing and packaging, and how to set clients up for online lead generation and AI search success. 

“The learning experience has been incredible. I feel like I’ve learned a huge amount about how to build Carrot websites I can now apply for clients.”

He’s putting his newfound knowledge to the test on his own real estate websites.

“My real estate businesses with their websites, to me, are clients. It is a laboratory, and it is a place to build empathy for my clients. Like eating your own duck soup.”

Though Mike feels his experience with marketing and copywriting has been helpful, he doesn’t believe people need 25 years of marketing behind them to launch a local marketing agency with the help of the CarrotAgency platform and the Accelerator training. Most of all, if you have the passion and drive to do the work, this is definitely an opportunity worth looking into, he said.

“If you’re ready to do the work and envision yourself helping home service contractors struggling with online visibility, this can be a great opportunity to build a highly scalable recurring revenue business.”

About Mike Connolly

Mike Connolly has 25+ years experience in marketing and sales in real estate, construction, and other industries. He runs Boulder SEO Group, a marketing agency that helps local service businesses get found and get the call, and he buys houses and land through his own Carrot-powered investing sites. He’s a Keap Certified Partner of 13+ years, author of Quick Flips for Ca$h, and a 2026 BBB Foundation Torch Awards for Ethics finalist. He’s lived in Boulder since 1972.

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