All Forum Posts by: Mark Shaver

Mark Shaver has started 12 posts and replied 112 times.

Teaser: "How your own website makes you a client-friendly professional."

@Bruce Woodruff wrote: "I would bet you that up to half of the really great contractors in a given area DO NOT have websites. Why? Because there are a lot of older Contractors who don't care for websites and since they are super busy, really don't need a website. I was one of those."

Okay, I accept the bet. I will argue that a contractor without a website is unlikely to be good.

Let's begin:

Image source via Pixabay.com

What is a good contractor

A good contractor is at all times a customer-friendly contractor. In the 21st century, it means that the contractor has a website:

1) The contractor publishes a calendar of past/ongoing/future work and vacations on the website. This will allow potential clients to see upcoming work breaks. The contractor also shows their dead and high season times.

2) Visitors can sign up for website news. Each month the contractor raffles off "1 free repair consultation, live or by Zoom" among subscribers.

3) The contractor publishes photos, videos, and estimates of repairs made in the portfolio. Subscribers can comment on the repairs or ask questions.

4) The contractor publishes articles and videos with tips for potential clients.

5) The site has a forum where visitors can ask questions of the contractor.

6) The contractor regularly organizes live streams on YouTube. Potential customers can watch the contractor work.

7) ...

The bottom line

The informative website makes the contractor accessible to both local and out-of-state virtual investors.

The website is first and foremost a place where a contractor posts all the information about himself. And only secondly, the website is a marketing tool. So even an elderly contractor who is overworked should have a website. If, of course, he wants to be customer-oriented.

0 Votes

Teaser: The secret part of the website lead generation equation. Knowing it can increase visitor conversion rates by up to 6 times.

@Jason Moss wrote: "Remember, getting someone to your website is just the first part of the equation, the second part is selling yourself by having good credibility, trust signals, reviews and making yourself stand out."

There's also a third, secret part of the equation. It's between attracting people to the website and selling yourself on the website. The secret part is called "website load time." Real estate investors don't know it and have no control over website load time. As a result, almost all investor websites are very slow, with most visitors leaving the REI website before it has finished loading.

Let me explain with an example. Let's ask Google PageSpeed to check the loading speed of your website:

Only 15% of your visitors have the patience to wait the long 13 seconds for your website to load. The other 77% of visitors leave the website before it's finished loading.

Jason Moss wrote: "Our SEO leads are still coming in just fine."

Jason, please speed up the loading time of your website to at least 3 seconds. This will raise your visitor conversion rate to 90%, according to Google's PageSpeed test. Then your contact form will get 6 times more SEO leads.

0 Votes

Teaser: Please don't hack Google!

@Will Fraser wrote: "Google something like "general contractor in ____________(the town you need) and check out late in the 2nd page and 3rd page of search results. Get somewhere between 3-8 of these to work up a quote for the same scope of work. These folks are not the SEO optimizers or the business kings that the Page 1ers are sure to be."

SEO optimizers are on any page of Google.

Let's send a query to Google "". We are interested in how many websites have the linguistically incorrect title "sell my house fast Oklahoma City," which is written exclusively for SEO:

The percentage of SEO headlines drops drastically on page 10, because Google has exhausted wholesaler sites in Oklahoma City. Starting on page 11, Google gives up pizza delivery sites, etc. But while the results page will have wholesaler sites on it, you can see from the headlines that they are doing SEO.

Contractors build websites in order to get visitors from search engines. You'll have a hard time finding a non-SEO contractor's website on page 2 or 3 of the Google search results.

Will Fraser wrote: "You'll have a higher shot (especially in sizable markets) of finding a contractor who is rock solid, but hasn't hit that SEO king status yet OR some other contractor that fits the bill for you."

If you want to find a contractor who is not invested in SEO, you can use a better Google hack. Go to Yelp.com and look for contractors who don't have websites. These contractors are guaranteed not to spend money on SEO and websites.

But if you need a good professional, then feel free to start looking for one of the first pages of Google. In the 21st century, most professionals have websites. And the lack of a website and related SEO is a sure sign of a novice professional.

2 Votes

Teaser: 1) How to properly measure website load speed and effectiveness. 2) How to reduce minimum PPC budget by 2,147,483,647 times

Tim, I apologize for the delay in replying. It took me a while to prepare answers to your great questions. Let's begin.

@Tim Oppelt wrote: "I would check out the PageSpeed Insights using lighthouse directly in chrome browser dev tools to estimate page speed. Maybe the server load might've been too great?"

Yes, website load speeds can change dramatically even within one hour if the hosting is inexpensive.

A budget hosting server hosts many websites so that the server is planned to be 100% utilized most of the time.
But there are so-called "managed hosting". They focus on quality website maintenance. Managed hosting is underutilized even during peak hours.

While shared hosting can cost $3 a month, managed hosting can cost $500 a month.

If you have an inexpensive hosting plan, then be prepared that your hosting will serve websites with more expensive plans first during peak hours. Slow website performance on a cheap plan is not bad hosting performance, it's by design. If you complain to the hosting about slow loading, it will offer you to switch to a more expensive hosting plan.

Monitoring website accessibility

Weak hosting can periodically make your website unavailable. Try to monitor the availability of your website through the service https://uptimerobot.com/ It will check every 5 minutes for free whether your website is accessible or not. The service will show you all the periods of inaccessibility of your website:

You can also use this service to monitor the availability of your PPC customers' websites. (The free plan allows you to monitor up to 50 websites). If your customer's hosting has regular availability problems, you should increase your PPC campaign budget or recommend changing his hosting.

Similarly, you can control the retention rate of visitors to your clients' websites. Your PPC price list is for a typical investor website where Google PageSpeed Insights shows a full load time of 12 seconds and a retention rate of 34 percent of visitors. If a new client's website takes much longer to load and retains 20 percent or less of visitors, you may want to ask for an increase in your minimal PPC budget. Otherwise, there's a risk that a client with a slow website won't get results at all on a typical PPC budget and will blame you.

Tim Oppelt wrote: "I'm not sure why there is such a discrepancy using GooPageSpeed Insights tool and Lighthouse in the chrome browser incognito mode."

Google Lighthouse test simulates the loading of a web page using an "average" browser. This is a theoretical value.

Google PageSpeed Insights uses download speed statistics when real visitors visit the website. This is a real value.

Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights may show different load speeds for the same website. This happens when your actual visitors differ from the "average" Internet visitors. For example, your website is visited mostly by older people with weak smartphones from areas with poor Internet. Then:

Google Lighthouse will show a theoretical high loading speed, targeting typical website visitors (they're young, update their smartphones often, may have great Internet from their workplace).
Google PageSpeed Insights will use the Chrome reports of your visitors' browsers and will show that the real download speed is low.

Therefore, using Google PageSpeed Insights is preferable. Use Google Lighthouse in situations where you cannot use Google PageSpeed Insights. For example, if you want to measure the load speed of a page that requires authentication.

Learn more in two my new articles "Google Lighthouse vs Google PageSpeed Insights, difference" and "How to use Google PageSpeed Insights". I have sent you links to them in direct messages.

Tim Oppelt wrote: "I don't think there's anything I can do 6X my conversion rate. Anyone, in REI at least, will tell you that spending $300 a month for a PPC campaign is extremely unlikely to produce any significant volume of deals."

The typical investor website filters and leaves only 34% of visitors due to slow loading. But loading a website is just the first step on the long road to closing the deal. Each of the typical investor's next step filters and leaves behind only a third of the visitors. From the full-flowing river of inbound PPC visitors, a thin trickle reaches the deal. Typical investors are forced to compensate for business process inefficiencies by increasing their advertising budget. $300 is the minimum money, at which an investor with a typical website has a good chance of getting at least one motivated lead.

But personally, your PPC campaigns have great growth potential. You are not a typical investor in a carrot website. You understand that finding the right PPC visitors is just the beginning. You organize all the steps in a methodical way:

You are worried that your website is slow to load (normal investors do not react to information that their website loads slowly)
You are blogging to keep visitors longer on the website
You offer a free course to get E-mail visitors
You build a community (circle) of regular visitors
You choose an advanced business website platform like Kartra.com

You have now outgrown the Kartra.com platform. It's starting to hold back your development. You can replace Kartra.com with some more advanced solution that supports blogging, forum, community building, ..... This will allow you to build all the steps the way you want, not the way Kartra.com imposes on you.

I agree with you that it's hard to dramatically increase conversions just by loading the website quickly. But if you optimize all the steps from PPC click to close the deal, you will increase your PPC companies conversion rate by much more than 6 times.

Reducing the minimum PPC budget to $0

Why does Google promote Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights? Google suffers deeply when the query "sell my house fast <city>" has to show slow investor websites. As a result, 2/3 of sellers go right back to Google because they didn't wait 12 seconds for the website to load and now they want other websites. Another 1/3 of sellers investigate low-performing investor websites and still come back to Google for a new batch of investor websites.

That's why Google's speed tests help create fast and efficient websites. Google wants more fast and efficient websites that it's not ashamed to show on the first page of search results.

When you optimize your website at all stages, the process of visiting the website will become very smooth. Visitors will start filling out forms. Google will immediately notice that its visitors go to your website and no longer come back to Google for other websites. Google will immediately raise your website to the top of the results for your keyword phrases.

Then another magic happens:

Source image via Wikimedia.org

Jerryll Noorden talks about it tirelessly. Every day visitors from Google will flood you with requests for your offer. Your minimum PPC budget will drop 2,147,483,647 times (from $300 to $0). The efficiency will be even greater than the efficiency of the PPC company with a high priced budget of $2,500 per month.

0 Votes

Teaser: Online PDF to Word converter.

@Jonathan Klemm wrote: "I'd suggest hiring a virtual assistant (VA) and they can probably transfer the pdf doc to word in a matter of a couple of hours and it will cost you $20."

I'd suggest using some online PDF to Word converter. And it can probably transfer the pdf doc to word in a matter of a couple of seconds and it will cost you $0.

There are a lot of converters. I use https://convertio.co/pdf-docx/ :

1 Vote

Chicago, Illinois

Teaser: How to choose digital marketing specialists

@Jonathan Bombaci wrote: "I just hired a marketing intern for the summer to help create and publish content. Would I be able to run you through my high level plan to see if we’re spending time in the right places to expand our online presence?"

All digital marketing professionals (content marketing, SEO, PPC,...) are divided into two types.

The first type of professionals are salary-oriented. There are 99% of them. They do not care what return you get from their work. Professionals of the first type will gladly help increase traffic to your website.

The second type of professionals work for results. There are 1% of them. It is important to them that you get the maximum result, and the salary is secondary. Professionals of the second type will refuse to work with your website, because in its current form it isn't suitable for digital marketing.

Evaluating the suitability of a website for digital marketing

Jonathan, the Google speed test shows that your website is in the red zone for digital marketing. Only 35% of your website visitors have the patience to wait 12 seconds for the website to load:

The remaining 65% of visitors leave your website because it's too slow to load.

This means that 65% of your digital marketing budget is being thrown away. That's why results-oriented professionals will refuse to work with your website until you satisfy Google's 90% rule.

Google's 90% rule

Google shows its 90% rule when you measure the speed of any website:

Let me translate the rule into human language: "First, speed up the load of your website and get your website visitor retention to at least 90%. Only then start doing digital marketing (content marketing, SEO, PPC,...)."

Google's 90% rule opens the door to the freedom to hire digital marketing professionals. You no longer have to tap your clogs to find 1% results-oriented professionals. Ask your webmaster to speed up your website load time to 3 seconds and boost visitor retention on your website by 90% on Google's test. After that:

Even a novice digital marketing intern will start working more efficiently than a skilled professional
And a skilled professional will start performing previously unseen miracles.

0 Votes

Teaser: 2/3 of visitors to REI websites never see webforms. Typical investor websites are very slow and most visitors leave before they finish loading. Let me explain with examples.

Example 1

@Mason Hickman wrote: "If your website is using Wordpress..."

Check Mason' Wordpress website via Google PageSpeed Test:

Only 23% of visitors wait until the end of loading, because the page takes 27 seconds to load.

Example 2

@Stephen Keighery wrote: "carrot.com is great for that"

Check Stephen' Wordpress website through Google PageSpeed Test:

Only 48% of visitors wait until the end of the download, because the page takes 10 seconds to load.

Example 3

@Jason Powellwrote: "I know my site uses Webflow currently"

Check Jason' Webflow website through Google PageSpeed Test:

Only 22% of visitors wait until the end of loading, because the page takes 26 seconds to load.

WebFlow webforms/template

Jason Powell wrote: "I know my site uses Webflow currently, so I suppose I can check to see if they have any forms/templates I could use..."

See articles:

But your problem is not choosing forms/templates. You can take any forms/templates you want. Only 22% of your WebFlow website visitors will see them. Your website will reject 78% of visitors with the slow website load time of 26 seconds.

Professional advice

Use the 90% rule for websites:

"First, reduce your website load time to 3 seconds and increase your website conversion rate to 90%. Only after that do the search for the right forms, design, marketing, etc."

Good luck!

1 Vote

Teaser: How to reduce the cost of PPC from $12k to 22k, while maintaining the effectiveness of the advertising company.

@Tim Oppelt wrote: "For a 6 month PPC in Austin, TX (competitive) I would recommend at least $12k (2k per month) at the absolute minimum. If you don’t have that kind of money to risk on PPC, I wouldn’t touch it at all and stick to cold calling, direct mail, SEO, or something else."

It's possible to reduce the PPC budget by several times and still keep the effectiveness of the advertising campaign the same as it was with a larger budget.

Tim's wholesaling website from his BiggerPockets profile will help explain my proposal. Google found that it is in the red performance zone:

It takes 23 seconds to load and only 16 % of visitors have the patience to wait for the website to load. The other 84% of visitors clicked on the PPC link, got to the website, but left before it finished loading.

If Tim speeds up the loading of his website, it will go into the green performance zone:

90-100% of visitors will wait until the end of the loading website
Website conversion will increase by 6 times
The budget for online advertising will be reduced by 6 times (from $12,000 to $2,000) while maintaining the same effectiveness.

@Laura Casillas wrote: "How much it’s recommended to budget for a six months campaign? I imagine the sky is the limit but for someone starting and with limited money, how much would be enough?"

The 90% rule will help you bring the sky down to earth and reduce your PPC budget from 2k per month to $333 per month.

The 90% rule says: "First, once increase the performance (conversion rate) of the website to 90-100% by Google's "PageSpeed Insights" test. Only then invest in an inbound flow of visitors over the years".

Laura, I sent you a direct message with a link to the full article: "90 percent rule" of Digital Marketing

0 Votes

Teaser: Links to statistical databases

@Mike Preshman wrote: "Are there any good resources to see current population trends and other real estate related data trends by town..."

General reviews of demographics and economics are available at statista.com. The service provides reports in PDF and PNG format for free: link

Mike wrote: "I often see top 10 population trend lists, but that seems unreliable and fluffy, more like click bait and marketing material rather than something to base investment decisions on."

The problem of incompetent opinions seems to go back more than a millennium. At one time Lao Tzu talked about it:

Image source via BrainyQuote.com

Use real estate APIs to make intelligent projections about real estate investing. I sent you the link to the article "100 Real Estate APIs" in the DM.

@Carson Mclean wrote: "I have a background in CS & machine learning and am interested in collaborating & discussing in the REI space"

I hosted a roundtable discussion on REI Machine Learning. I sent you a link to the papers and discussion in the DM.

0 Votes