All Forum Posts by: Scott Costello

Sean,

Not that I have actually quit Investor Carrot, but if you stop paying they will take your site and leads will be permanently be deleted.

https://help.oncarrot.com/tutorial/how-to-cancel/

So if you have written any content for the site yourself, make sure you have backups so you don't lose that stuff.  I'm fairly certain you aren't allowed to use any carrot created content on other sites.

I don't know about the SEO company's claim of being 1 of 50 certified companies.  I know that my site ranks very very well.  I know a decent amount about SEO and what it takes to get ranked.  It all looks legit and better yet, well done in my mind. 

Just like almost all "certifications" you take them with a grain of salt.  I wouldn't judge a company for having one either way.  Just like I could care less that a car is certified as "Car and Drivers 10 best cars for 2016."  Doesn't mean much to me.

Perhaps Trevor will see your questions and answer them as well.

I recommend using a service like Investor Carrot or Leadpropeller.  Building a website yourself is going to cost you so much time and effort in the beginning.  It's worth the $50 a month to have those services create and host your site.

I think you may be a little confused as to what your options are.  Like @Bryan O. said, Wordpress is a CMS.  They do offer a hosting environment for free at Wordpress.com, but what MOST people use is their CMS platform that you can download from Wordpress.org.  Though almost all webhosts will have a one click install of wordpress available for you.

Best of luck!

I think you gave up way to early on your investor carrot site.  It took me 5 months before I got my first lead and after 9 months I was getting 10 leads/mo and after 2 years I'm getting roughly 40 leads (sometimes 20 sometimes 60) per month.  

You can do all the things Carrot says to do, but it really depends on the competition in the market you are targeting.  That will determine how fast you will rise to the top of the search results. 

You really jumped off the ship right before it was going to hit land I'm afraid.   

 I suggest the Free level of Podio + GlobiFlow.  That is unless you have more then 5 other people you need to be included in your workspaces.  Then you will need to upgrade podio to a paid subscription.

 Podio is such a great system because you can customize it to work exactly the way your business works.  Throw in GlobiFlow and you can automate many processes like follow up, data gathering, scheduling and more.  

My first year of using Investor Carrot I was on the "non-content" plan.  All I did with my website is go through the provided content and reword the articles (same ton and same structure).  I did this for two reasons..1 to give me more unique content; 2 to better say what my company does.  In total it took me 10 to 15 hours.  Other then that I really didn't do much else.

It took my site about a year to see roughly 15 to 20 leads per month.  The first 4 or so months I got piddly squat (1 to 2 leads).  

Hope that helps

@Dan Dawson I'm a huge supporter of using a site like Investor Carrot (or Lead Propeller) to get your real estate websites. The monthly cost ($49/mo to $99/mo) is easily the best money I spend in my REI business.

I am a software/website developer at my day job and like @Michael Lerch said, there is ALOT more that goes into a website then just setting it up. Trust me I know. I ran a split test between Investor Carrot and an REI Site I setup from scratch using Wordpress, a domain from Godaddy and hosting on bluehost. My results came out about like this...

I ran this test for about a 15 months.  The Investor Carrot website was a couple months older then the Custom Site but that shouldn't have skewed the numbers to much.

Custom Built Website

Like I said I used a combination of Wordpress, a Theme ($67), Domain from Godaddy (~$8/yr) and hosting from hostgator ($~5/yr).  I also hired someone to help with SEO ($250/mo) and also write the content for me ($~50/article).  I started out writing the content but it SUCKED so I gave in a hired someone.  GREAT DECISION!  Here are my results after a year...

• RANKING: Local We Buy Houses & Sell Your House Fast keyword ranking #1
• COST: ~$5000 after 1 year (Hosting, Theme, Content, SEO, etc..)
• VISITORS: ~200 / mo (by month 12)
• LEADS: ~ 5 /mo (by month 12..didn't get my first till month 5)
• DEALS: 0

Investor Carrot Site

I started with investor carrot back when the sites where about half the price they are now.  I initially signed up for the 3 website package ($49/mo).  Design, Content, Contact Forms and onsite SEO was already done for me.  Content was template based but did pull in your company information and target area info to help with local rankings.  For the first 12 months I had no other costs but $49 per month.

What I don't show above is how much time I spent building the custom site because I didn't keep track of that to well.  I can say that I only really spent 10 hours or so rewording some of the content on the investor carrot site.  I did this because I wanted it to be more unique (since it was template based) and more inline with what my company did. Other then that I just ignored it.

Another thing is that Cost over the long haul will favor the Custom site because after about a year the maintenance and things like SEO and Content creation can be scaled back considerably.  Even if you eliminate those costs and do it yourself, it will take about 5 years before the IC and Custom site would have a similar TOTAL COST over their LIFE to date.

The BIG difference from my experiment is the conversion of site visitors to lead. 

Custom Site ~2.5%  
Investor Carrot site ~6%

After about 15 months of running this experiment I decided to stop working on my custom site and focus my resources on the Investor carrot site.  The money is in the conversions.  I've since seen 7 more deals come through my IC site and the number of leads has increased to between 30 to 60/mo.  

Hopefully this helps anyone who is trying to make this decision.  There are some downsides to IC...

• Templated Content
• Similar looking sites to other IC users
• Don't have full control over the Wordpress dashboard

I don't have any experience with Lead Propeller but I've heard good things as well.  Best of luck in what ever direction you decide to head in.  I firmly believe that a website is a great idea, just don't make it your core source of lead generation in the beginning.

 I don't have a thread, but when I figure it out I'll will post a tutorial on my blog about how to set it up. I'm fairly far off from that point though as I am working on another Podio project at the moment.

I would use GlobiFlow for this.  You can pick and choose which fields you want included in your export and have it exported to an Excel file.

Yes, my Podio setup will create a single PDF file that includes all the letters.  Then I have to go in and print them manually to my printer...then stuff and stamp.

I haven't used GoBigPrinting or any other type of service like this just yet.  But the others are YellowLetters.com and MarketLikeAWholesaler.com.  I think pricing is comparable between them all.

Hey Alden,

I'm actually trying to accomplish this myself with my Podio Direct Mail Campaign Manager (you can go to my blog and watch my tutorials on how to set it up yourself).  

I figured out how to do it using Lob and TryPaper but using those services the cost per letter is about ~$1.07 which is expensive.  

I've also been working with Jerry Puckett of MarketLikeAWholesaler.com to be able to have Podio send them a mailing list (based of a mailing schedule in Podio) and then they would put the letters together.  This is very promising and I'm excited to see if it will work.  I'm still in the VERY early stages of developing the system and working with Jerry to get the right information to the right place.

 Thanks Kyle!  If you want a more organized place for my videos it's best to go to my blog (see signature).  My tutorials are broken up into many videos and they aren't ordered correctly in Youtube.