Ryan,
I'm new to this, so take my comments from the... just getting started perspective.
The first thing I noticed is how competitive my market is (I'm in Fort Worth, Arlington). There are some markets where a little bit of work on your website will get you ranked quickly on page one for organic searches. In my market, it is going to take a long time and a lot of work to build my website high enough to rank organically on the first page. I've seen some powerful numbers that talk about the value of organic leads and being ranked in the top 4... after the top 4 might as well be page 2... after page 2, it does not matter your rank.
I've tried some direct mail to get people to go to my site, but 100% so far have called my phone number and not gone to the website as far as my tracking has shown.
That leaves me one option... pay per click. It has been a learning curve. I'm starting to get the hang of it. It is a dance between developing my site and getting my PPC campaigns lined up. Example: I rank higher with clicks and pay less per click if the page I'm linking to is a good fit with the search. That means I need lots of really niche PPC groups going to different niche pages because I can't create one page that works for everything.
Here is where I've learned a lot of lessons about what does not work. PPC is not hard, but getting the right kind of leads requires some experimentation and you have to pay to experiement. I paid a lot of money because one week early on a bunch of people were looking to sell their house boats, but my search results pulled up as they were looking for sell my houseboat. I have learned to watch my clicks and put in negative keywords.
Second problem is that in order for me to rank up, I'm going to have to keep putting a lot of time in to my website, SEO, PPC... so I am considering bringing someone on that can do this for me and I can focus more on other income streams.
For what it is worth, I've been using Investor Carrot as well. I used another company but was not getting any conversions on my website (100% bounce rate). I started seeing conversions as soon as I switched over. I learned that there is more that goes into a website that I have time to figure out. I have really appreciated the lessons and conference calls that Investor Carrot offer. They are a bit pricey, but again, I'm getting leads that I was not getting with another option.
I'm trying out Bing PPC. I have not seen any leads from it yet... but if I can get it to start working, the clicks are cheaper. I just don't know if the right kind of person is using Bing.
Last lesson is I'm having to remember that I am not writing for me and my enjoyment, but I need to be writing copy for the potential buyer. I am not good at this. Sometimes I think I do too much and hurt my conversions, so I undo my changes and the conversion gets better again.
Tim
www.wattsbuyshouses.com
