All Forum Posts by: Trevor Mauch

Sweet Elizabeth! Yep just reach out. Maybe one of our weekly coaching calls or a 1 on 1 strategy call w/ Adrian will help. Or if you don't have the time to implement the stuff hit us up and we can chat about the options there. Have a great weekend and we're here for ya as always! 

@Elizabeth Wilson Thanks for the shout out. Hey, reach out to us and we'll get you dialed in on a marketing strategy to get leads and results coming in :-) Just reach out to support and we've got ya! 

Hey @Rae Hoffman I love a good healthy discussion :-) 

One great thing is that there's no one solution that's the right fit for everyone. 

For the people who have the time, patience, and desire to go through all of those free resources to find the right settings, read the right reports / tools to get the right keywords, wade through the right articles... sweet! We actually have all of that available for free on our blog as well. So we totally get the side of the coin that there are free ways to do those things mentioned above. It's similar to a book, or coach, or consultant... I can find almost anything I need online for free... but often times things packaged into a system or a process that make it easier for me as the consumer and help me streamline things is of extra value and worth investing in. 

As far as the rankings, by "systems" I should have clarified but I was referring to website systems specific to real estate investing. Wordpress is the dominant force for sure. But the fundamental difference in a WP site vs. something like Carrot is that with WP you have to... 

1. Find or pay to have a theme built (hope it converts visitors into leads well... most don't)
2. Get hosting (most use really low grade sub $10/mo shared hosting)
3. Come up w/ the proper content strategy (most don't have the experience to structure the content correctly to perform well or be a benefit for SEO)
4. Write that content
5. Add a bunch of plugins (which often times increase chance of vulnerability by hackers or slow things down... but all require the site owner to maintain the plugins)
6. Dial the site in on mobile (most WP themes don't perform well converting visitors to leads on mobile, at any given time we're running 10-20 split tests across dozens of sites improving performance on our platform)
7. Run split tests to continually increase performance
8. Setup your analytics correctly (we make it easy or use our built in analytics)
9. Continue to update themes, plugins, WP (which isn't hard, it's very easy as you know... but many people don't want to do that)
10. Keep up on the SEO trends / market trends (which we help our clients stay ahead of)
11. etc. etc. etc.  

100% anyone can use free or cheap tools to rank well in Google and in the case of a WP site... the simple fact of it being WP doesn't contribute to it ranking well at all.  But what we try to do is help our clients not have to go through the steps above... streamline it for them... let them personalize and customize things within our framework that is proven to work... then train and help them as they implement their marketing. 

Just a service focused on people who don't want to have to go it alone or wade through things themselves. For those who want to go the lowest price option and invest more time and want  more control... Carrot or a platform like ours isn't the right fit. 

With the results side of things... I'd be happy to open up our data set and show you the results of Carrot clients... both SEO wise and actual leads. Upward of 28k-40k leads a month come through Carrot... over 60% from SEO. 

We're 100% on the same page that a "top ranking" is completely a vanity metric. Even SEO companies that say "we'll get you on page 1" aren't truly serving the client well because the client thinks "page 1" is awesome...when in reality over 50-60%+ of all traffic goes to the top 3 results... so really if a site isn't in the top 3 it's likely not pulling much unless it's a crazy highly searched term. 

We're 1000000% on the same page here and our focus is and always has been on results... which only start w/ the ranking as you know. Then goes to converting the visitor into the lead (28k-40k/mo w/ us), then converting those leads into profitable deals. 

So yep, we're speaking the same language :-) 

Again, I always love good healthy convo and your points are 100% valid. 

Just different solutions for different people and I'm happy anytime to dive in and show people our data and results if anyone is curious or wondering. 

Thanks for spurring the convo Rae! Good stuff. 

Hey @Account Closed I saw you put in a note for help w/ Carrot so I reached out to you directly though email last week.  Glad we could tackle it for you and help you dial in some of those other settings I mentioned in the email. We're here for ya!  Definitely make sure to reach out to our live chat or email support for the quickest help. 

We've got you :-) 

Hit me up if we can help you get a marketing plan picked and get it implemented.  Also there are some other things we can help you w/ to dial in the design and personalization / credibility of your site to really cut through the clutter in your market. 

Hey @Rae Hoffman Thanks for posting this through!  Really great to get your insights on here for sure. 

As you mentioned, the Yoast plugin is in the WP repository and can be edited (which we've done and adjusted some of the functionality as well) and like you mentioned we've given the original author the credit they require in the site code... and in our trainings and anytime anyone asks we're never shy about letting people know it's Yoast as the actual SEO grader on the individual posts and pages. 

But, that tool is only one small part of what we do on the SEO side of things in our platform and for our clients... which is why our clients are pulling more top rankings than any other platform. It's our full focus on helping our clients are all stages of doing SEO that have gotten those results over the years. 

So yes, it's part of the functionality that helps our clients better optimize content even when they're not SEO experts... but I think everyone would agree that using Yoast alone won't get you good rankings. Here's a few other things we do to help our clients perform better in the search engines. 

• Picking the right keywords: Every site starts w/ SEO settings and keywords that better give them a chance of getting in front of the right prospects in their local market. Then from there have training and support to help them hone in their keyword choice further if they want to ramp it up. 
• Optimize the content: This is where the SEO Grader / Yoast comes in. To help make it easier for the non SEO expert to optimize content for a specific keyword. Works great for that. Also the social share settings, xml sitemap, and robots meta info is run through this. But the right settings of course need to be selected and tweaked (which we've done). 
• Target and implement an SEO plan: Our training, weekly coaching calls, or 1 on 1 strategy calls then help you identify and refine your SEO strategy and action plan. 
• Content Marketing: Our Content Pro system w/ localized pre-written articles help add fresh content optimized for long-tail keyword phrases local to their area can help w/ SEO (but in a competitive market if everyone uses the same ones and didn't adjust the content at all, the results will vary)
• Localized "Location Specific Landing Pages: One of the most effective things for SEO for investors is location specific pages for each market. We started doing this 5+ years ago and brought it over into Carrot in 2014 as a feature to make it easier for people to launch, create, and optimize location specific landing pages (the Yoast plugin then helps to optimize the content on that page). 
• Coming Soon: Ranking tracking tool, competitive analysis, backlink checker, etc. 

So yep, it's 100% correct that the SEO grader on individual piece of content is using the awesomeness of what the guys and gals at Yoast have built, but it's really the whole ecosystem around SEO that we've built that makes up the majority of our SEO resources for our clients. 

I just wanted to make sure that people didn't read that above and think just putting Yoast on a site was going to get them ranked high in Google... because they see Carrot sites ranking well everywhere... the Yoast tool is a very small part of what caused that result. 

Great convo here y'all! 

Glad to see you're doing well @Michael Hayes! 

@Travis Washington there are of course similarities w/ the two but we have always put performance and ROI for our client at the #1 thing we focus on with our system and the support structure we provide our clients after they join. Many people say the support structure and our strategy team have been worth 10x the cost difference with the lower cost providers... not to mention our focus on performance (both in SEO and conversion).

I think the best thing you can do is join Carrot for a few months... engage in our training and our support structure... we'll help you craft a strategy that'll crush it (on our weekly coaching calls and 1 on 1 strategy calls)... get you dialed in and then we're here as you have issues or need help / guidance when you get your marketing going. 

We're here for ya :-) We'll never be the lowest cost but always focus on helping our clients get the best results and ROI.

Heck, even if you go w/ another system I'd be happy to help you and give guidance on strategy or insights on how to get your leads up there. We're here for ya either way! I'd just say to go w/ what the market and the research tells you will get you the highest ROI for you at the end of the day.

Trevor

Hey @Dan K. I totally get ya and really value your perspective a ton. Again any company that does anything worth while will hit things they need to improve... and it's all about how a company acts on those things. 

As for the Godaddy issue again, there are probably 50+ people a week that use Godaddy with their new Carrot sites so it's the platform we use the most with our clients and hadn't seen that type of block on a domain on the Godaddy side before. So I'd love to investigate that further with you for sure and dive into your Godaddy account personally to see what the issue is so it'll help us deal with it with any future clients that we see the same thing. Lets connect offline. 

On the cancellation side again every Carrot account can be cancelled with one click in the account dashboard... it automatically stops all billing when that happens so we do make it crazy easy. The issue that popped up was the first few times you tried it was on your cell phone... and that was something we honestly didn't have in place... the ability to cancel when someone was logged into the account on a cell phone. 99% of the use of the Carrot platform is usually on a desktop so it was an oversight on our end to double check that. But yep we've got you covered now and we appreciate the help and heads up pointing that out. 

We'd be game to have you back sir :-) 

I'll reach out directly to you and lets see if we can make this happen my man! We really want to see y'all succeed and hate anytime there's any issues that get in the way of that. 

Trevor

Hey @Dan K. hope all is well! 

I wanted to hop in here because the experience you're mentioning you had with Carrot isn't the experience the vast majority of our clients have... so I wanted to dive in and tackle this to see where we need to improve, see what went wrong during your process, and honestly take candid feedback where we can improve and continually get better.

There's no other system out there that can show the results in this industry (as far as leads generated and SEO rankings held) that Carrot has helped our clients achieve... but along the way... there are bound to be hiccups and for every 1 person who didn't have a good experience we get another 100 that rate us a 9 or 10 (out of 10) on our satisfaction survey. So I take feedback like this crazy seriously and want to get to the bottom of it. 

I checked your account and I see the issue you experienced and apologize for anything caused by something on our end. 

First off, our team replied and engaged in your live chats and emails really fast during business hours and were working through the issues w/ you... but the one issue we had no control over was the Godaddy issue. 

It looks like you were using Godaddy which we have tutorials on that show how to update the CNAME settings. Most of our clients actually use godaddy for their domains and it's usually a couple minute update in your Godaddy account like our tutorial shows. 

However, for some reason the domain inside your Godaddy account was "locked down" on the Godaddy side and Godaddy wasn't letting you do the CNAME change. You sent us a screenshot showing that and we did offer to log into your Godaddy account for you to make the update... but there was some sort of confirmation Godaddy was wanting done it looks like to enable you to make the CNAME change. Honestly we've never seen this before so it confused us as much as it did you. 

The Cancel Process 

In another thread with us, it looks like after you were frustrated with the ability of Godaddy to allow your account to make the CNAME setting update (which again we don't have control over) you requested to cancel, and our rep Jake guided you back to your account to click the cancellation link in your account to cancel the account.  We require this for security reasons for our customers so someone else doesn't maliciously try to cancel someones account that isn't theirs. But you did notice a bug that was 100% our fault in that the cancellation link doesn't work on mobile devices... that's an oversight on our end because we didn't expect people to be setting up and editing their sites or their account on their cell phones... mainly on desktop... but as soon as you alerted us to that we fixed it. 

Again, we apologize for that experience you had and I can say with 100% confidence most of our clients use Godaddy and the CNAME change is really quick and easy on Godaddy and your site would have been live crazy fast. 

Again me, it pains me that you had this experience w/ us and if we would have been able to get your domain unlocked on Godaddy (which again, we've never seen that and don't have control over) your site would have been up fast and you'd be on your way diving into the tools Carrot offers, diving into our weekly Coaching Calls, etc. We're still here for ya if you want to give us another go and we really appreciate the candid feedback that you sent out way man! 

Here's to an amazing 2017! 

Hey Angela! Great question here and my advice is to honestly get very very clear what type of business you're going to focus on in the first 6 months... and build the minimum you need to build to get your first deal done. 

A huge mistake I see is people investing too much time and money into over systemizing their business when there isn't even the flow of leads and deals that warrants all of that automation and systems. 

Build something very basic right now. 

You don't need a full CRM and all that automation right now if you don't have a steady stream of leads coming in. We have lots of clients who just use our lead manager to manage their leads for a while until they need a full blown CRM w/ fancy automation. Or I've seen many very successful investors who still run their leads on a spreadsheet (you can do that probably up to a couple dozen leads a month). 

Get rid of these items from your list and focus on just the most important 10-20% to get rolling otherwise you'll be so overwhelmed by everything (like you are now) that it'll be tough to get going:

Get rid of these for now (these are all good things, but things you don't NEED to get your first deal)... 

• Twitter, LinkedIn, and all other social media
• PipeDrive, Zoho, Podio, Infusionsoft (I'd honestly do InvestorFuse vs. podio as it's more plug and play and simpler)
• Globiflow... don't need until you need true automation w/ podio. Down the road. Close some deals first. 
• No need for a VA for now... you need to take your own calls at first so you can see how it works and refine your process. Then once you are so busy w/ calls and leads you can't handle them... bring in someone to help you there
• Website stuff... you don't need blog posts right now, no zapier or IFTTT... even though I'm in the business I'll be the first one to say that you don't *need* a website to close a deal. 

So that leaves you w/... 

1. Identifying what types of deals you're wanting to do
2. Choosing how much time / money budget you have to grow your business. If you have no time... you'll need to spend money to get things done for you. if you have no money... you'll need to invest significant time and focus. 
3. If you have at least $1k/mo to do marketing... work w/ someone who is doing direct marketing well and launch some very targeted DM campaigns to get the leads coming in. OR, launch a high performing website and do PPC (don't do SEO at first, that comes later). 
4. Keep working that until you close the first deal... roll those profits into your marketing budget... roll those profits into systems build out when it's fully necessary... scale to the # of deals you're wanting to do to meet the income goals you have. 

But ya... you definitely need to get rid of the distraction and you need to focus on getting your first deal done as fast as you can and as lean as you can. Over complicating it w/ system and whatnot is one of the quickest ways to kill a real estate business before it starts. 

Hope that helps a bit :-) Go get 'em and reach out anytime! 

hey! Ya I grew up in K Falls and own a couple properties there still. 

The Bogatays should be easy to get a hold of with a quick google search. Find their construction company online and call them and they should be able to get you in contact with Matt. 

What's the name of the apartments? I can let you know if they're in a solid location and good reputation.