Joe: You're in for a special treat today, because we are going to be talking with a guy that is one of the few in the industry that understands data as well as he does and gets to see the entire spectrum of real estate. I mean, like this guy has his finger on the pulse of real estate investors all over the country because his company runs a vast majority of their Web sites. He gets to see in the back office what's going on and where the leads are coming from. What kind of leads they are, who's actually really doing deals. And Trevor is a really good friend of mine. He runs a company called Carrots, Investor Carrot Web Sites. But on this podcast, we're going to be talking about how COVID-19, or Corona virus is affecting real estate investors and how to pivot your message to get more leads. And I'm excited to have Trevor on your first. I want to mention, guys, my book. This podcast is brought to you by two things today. Number one, my book, Wholesaling Lease Options. Discover one of the fastest and easiest ways to make money in real estate today. You can get this book for free at WLOBook.com, WLOBook.com, and the book is free. But if you want the audio book, you can get it just for dollar ninety nine at WLOAudio.com, WLOAudio.com. Check that out.

Joe: The other thing, so I have three sponsors. Is that OK if I overdeliver? Just kidding. I got another sponsor here because I like Carrots and I like Trevor. I've liked Trevor for a long, long time. He's got a great company. I'll talk more about this later on in the podcast. But if you want to go check out investor care at Web sites, go to JoeLikesCarrots.com. I've been recommending people to Carrot for years since it started probably five, six years now or more. And so I'm glad that I'm proud to recommend Trevor because he's a friend. I've known him for years and he's a good dude. He really is. So let's just bring him on, shall we. Enough of this. Oh, yeah. By the way, a lot of you guys were watching this right now live on Facebook and YouTube. So if you would, please type in the comments and say hello. Just say hello. Tell us where you are watching this from. And as we go through this, if you have questions, please type them in the comments either on YouTube or Facebook. And I will bring them up here and we can mention them or ask them to Trevor. So let's bring Trevor on. Trevor. How are you, my man?

Trevor: Joe, doing great. And I appreciate it. That appreciate you hopping on new with you. Like last time we saw each other was down in Napa to hang out. Now we're all stuck in our houses.

Joe: That was so fun. Are you still doing another Amplify mastermind this year?

Trevor: We are. Do you know if you got the email? Yes. But we're supposed to be in July in Philadelphia. But we'll see. We'll see how the world is at that point.

Joe: I forgot to respond. You're good. We'll talk about that off line. I. How are things at Carrot?

Trevor: Things are good. Like we were talking before here. I think all of us, no matter what business we're in, have been impacted in some way in the past month. And whether it's the location that we're working now versus where we were working before or like you said, whether it's the flexibility we have, we can't go to the coffee shop and get work in or whether our businesses actually took a hit here. We took a little bit of a dip, which I'll show you guys some really cool data that's applicable to all of those investors and agents. But then we saw things rise back up because people are seeing the opportunity and you should not pull back marketing. It's where you should be doubled down. So it's an interesting time, to say the least, for sure, to be an entrepreneur.

Joe: So tell us what Carrot does for people that don't know.

Trevor: Yes. So at a very high level care, we hope we help a high level real estate investors and now agents control the conversation online. So and get more leads. We work for a lot of the biggest investors in the country. Gabriel Garcia is just one that popped up my mind, a big investor or sort of they just moved everything over to our system from a custom site. And we essentially help we help people get in front of the highest motivated leads and prospects, mostly sellers, but buyers to houses of land online. We hope to convert them at a higher rate. And then we have content marketing tools to help you stand out. And that's kind of our bread and butter man is how do we help you stand out, build authority locally, get more the best leads.

Joe: Very nice. I don't know what's going on. We're supposed to be broadcasting to Facebook and YouTube right now, but it doesn't look like it's working. But we're still recording this, so we're still good. And normally we've got a bunch of people in here commenting and saying, hey, what's going on? And we don't today. So we're good, man. I'm a little embarrassed. Nobody watches this podcast. That's what you probably don't think that like nobody watches the show. It shows zero viewers right now. What I see where there are more people than that that watch us. All right. Yeah, we've got millions and billions of podcast listeners now. All right. So you do more than just Web sites, though, right? I mean, like, you really help investors get leads. And a lot of people wonder, like, is SEO dead? Can you really still get leads on Web sites from motivated sellers? What's your answer to that?

Trevor: Yeah. So it's kind of a multi-part answer. So the first thing is this is any of the marketing that you all do if you're doing offline marketing, then say it's direct mail or radio or TV or cold call or text messaging or RBMs. If you're doing any of that, imagine what happens when someone gets that text message or cold call or direct mail drop, what happens is they pick up their phone and they want to research it. Right. We're kind of in the age of research.

Trevor: So all of the marketing that y'all are doing right now creates online demand. It's causing people to Google search something related to the problem that they have or something related to the information that you send out them. So one thing that we found in our data quite a bit is the number three most visited Web page. Across all of our Web sites, whether it's land or seller or buyer or agents, it's always the about page, right. It's where people want to go there all the time. Yeah, exactly. People in Atlanta, the home page and go number one, I want to check the box. Does this company have a service that looks like they can solve my problem? You know, that's what the home page for. The number two, they go kind of like, how does this thing work? And then number three, like, what do I want to work with these people? Who are they? That's where testimonials committed about. So that's the first answer is, is that we're in the age of research where needed credibility. And if you're sending out direct mail pieces or any outbound marketing, that seller likely is getting something else from somebody else or they see other options out there in their research.

Trevor: And it's your job to use that Web site to build up your credibility to close more leads. So a good example. This is an investor out of Oklahoma City. So Carter stuff. One hundred two cell homes, a big national brand. Now they've started the franchise out their company and they've had a site for years. But their main marketing was always off line. It was always radio, TV, direct mail, things like that. And then a big business. And so what happened was they were getting leads and closing deals from their Web site, but it was always trickle through from their offline marketing that created online demand. People searching their company name, searching their phone numbers, searching Carter's name because he was in some of the ads seeing if they're legit, stand out. Once they once they kind of moved over to Carrot from their customer site and we dialed them in to stand out, they saw a double doubling in their ROI in the offline market. So their leads doubled just from the same traffic. They had it sort of convert better.

Trevor: And then their lead, this is the cool thing about a Web site. Joe, the lead to close ratio at that point. Yeah, more than doubled. So and that's just accidentally put in the site. The next answer to your question is, is online and SEO relevant? Like let's say we're looking for people who don't already know about us. They didn't get it off my marketing piece from us and they're kind of seeking out of a problem or a solution in our data. We see every quarter online demand actually increases as people get more and more comfortable with using these things. I think most of us go to Google first and we have a question. We go to Google first and we have a problem when we need a pest control company. We often don't text our friends these days and say, who are you working with? We often go to Google and look it up and then maybe corroborate that with friends. And it's no different for sellers. I can show you some examples. Also dig into some data, which is really cool. All right. Now as well.

Joe: Let's do that. I want to ask you another question real quick, by the way. We do have a lot of people on YouTube right now. Sweet. What's up? Sanding them off market opportunities. I guess. Nick Stirling. Sandra. Sorry, guys. It's just that stream yard which we're using, announces, zero viewers. And I went to Facebook and we're not on Facebook. So I'm glad you guys are here. Really? All right. This is things something that I know a lot of people would ask about. If I just get a site, you know, my site's going to look like everybody else's site. Does it do any good still to have a Web site that looks like everybody else's? Do your questions.

Trevor:Really good questions. And that's kind of one of the double edged swords of where we are today in our business. Right. We've been in business for 6 years now. And because we focus on performance and we focus on results. What happened was you start to see more and more the top investors adopts our platform. Right. And so if you were to Google someone else fast into any city or sell my land fast. And certainly city, you're probably gonna find somewhere between 3 and 8 carrot sites control and page one of Google like every city in the country, which is a great thing because it works. But then also it brings up that objection of like, well, shoot, I don't want to look just like those other ones, but I still want to get a result, a good result. And so now there's a couple of cool things that we rolled out just recently. Even we have more designs now. We have like six or seven designs that are all based off of data and performance. They all convert really good. They load insanely fast. The next thing is, if you're looking for a different aesthetic, most of our clients just don't change the design of the website. And I can show some examples you look at and we go, that's a carrot site and we have a new visual Web site editor where it's like all drag and drop stuff. Everything is drag and drop in there. And that rolled out a month ago. And so many cool things you can do now with the visual editor make to make him stand out.

Trevor: So the short of it is, guys go in and just really bring your personality in. The first thing is whether you're using Carrot or any other platform. Make sure that the Web site addresses the conversation going on in there like, hey, if there are a house seller, it's going through a painter or land seller or cash buyer. What is it that their desire is? What's the problem that they have? Make sure that the content on the Web site addresses that problem. But then next, make sure that the Web site guides through guides that prospect through the exact order of where they have questions or objections. So it's first of all, hey do they have a solution that can solve my problem. Next, it's how does this thing work? Next, it's who are they and are they credible? And then how do we take action? In the last kind of piece advice I give people, we can show examples. Whether you're a Carrot customer or not, you can take these examples and do them in your business to get better results in.

Trevor: Right now, especially y'all, the best way to stand out is by bringing you out front, is putting out content that builds authority and as the market gets more and more competitive. If you're a real estate investor, most investors offer essentially the same service. Right, they're showing up to a seller's house. So they're showing up online saying, hey, I can buy your house, I can pay cash, I can close quickly. And if you're offering the fundamentally same unique selling proposition as everybody else. How do you stand out no matter what website system news? Right. And so there's a couple piece advice that gives people, especially right now in this market where it's really competitive is one to one. Can you offer something fundamentally different? That solves a problem in any new and unique way? We'll go through Joe's training. He shows you guys how to do those things. He shows he knows how to come up there with a different solution to solve their problem in a different way than most other wholesalers or investors are right there. SLOClass.com. Guys go through that because that is going to give you another thing in your tool belt to show up with a fundamentally different offer.

Trevor: But number two, how do you make sure now that they that they feel more trust and believability in working with you? That's where having a good about page is important. You know, having your picture on there. Or a video on there. That's where getting good case studies and testimonials. Really important. I'll show you a couple of HUMINT that are absolutely crushing. And Denver was one of the most competitive markets in the country. And I want to show this example of look at the way that their testimonials, y'all versus most others and who would you work with. And so that that's the deal is yes. Carrot's going to give you a great start. Go through there and customize the visual with the designs, with the visual editor. But the most important thing is putting your unique spin to it and put content out that's unique to you and I'll show you how to do that.

Joe: Very good. So let's talk about what you're seeing with COVID-19, everything that's going on right now. What are some what some data that you're seeing through your clients that you help and serve do?

Trevor: Let me share my screen, because this is really, really cool.

Joe: And if you're listening to this on audio, I'll still repeat for you audio guys and gals what Trevor is talking about here. Yes, it's working.

Trevor: Can you see here now, Joe? I am going to add it to the stream. Look at that. So. So this is insane. Now, I'll explain it as good as I possibly can for those that don't have the visual of it. But if you don't have the visual that go over to Joe's YouTube channel and get the full visual. So some really cool stuff. Yeah. So one of the one of the advantages that we've got is we have so much access to a broad set of data, pretty much every market in the country. Seven thousand agents and or investors, mostly investors. Almost 100000 leads a month when you include phone call leads. What I'm showing you guys, here is just the websipients It's like web form civets. Yeah. So there's a couple kind of cooltrends here that I'm sure you know, that are very specific to COVID that investors and agents can use right now to both know what's going on in the market. But number two, how to adjust your marketing to stand out right now and win as the market kind of comes out of this COVID stuff.

Trevor: So the chart that you guys are seeing right here and this is directly from our Google Analytics. So this is all the traffic that's coming to our clients Web sites since May, since March 1st through today. So at the time, the recording was April 29 right here. That's the data says 3, April 29. And you can see way over here. That's March 1st. And then way over here is today, OK? So, all right. There's a twenty eighth, which was which was Tuesday. And that's the last full day of data that we got for twenty ninth and forces right now. And so what you guys find is first of all, this isn't related to COVID. But it's an interesting piece of data. Is those of you watching the video of this this part of sessions and sessions, is this essentially people that landed on our client's Web sites. This could be buyers be sellers. The majority of this or sellers, probably 60 to 70 percent of this traffic is motivated house sellers or land sellers. And you can see there's a trend here every week. There's an up and down. Now, this is not related.

Joe: That's a weekly chart. It's going up and down. Straight across.

Trevor: Exactly. And so you'll find that there's always more demand from sellers and buyers online. They're actually seeking out and searching solutions at the start of the week. So you're Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, always Monday. Tuesday is always the peak time when people are looking. Except for that one. That was where those Wednesday. Let's see this one. That's Tuesday. We had another Tuesday. And why is that important? Well, it's important because if we know that that's when you're most motivated buyers and sellers are searching. How can you make sure that you're serving up marketing messages in front of them when they're actively looking for it on your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? Now, it doesn't mean that they're not looking on Sunday. Right. Because you can even look down here where the bottom of the value is there. They're still over thirty two thousand sellers and buyers. They hit our Web sites on Sunday, March 8. Right.

Trevor: The majority of people are searching every day. But you just see spikes in your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So if you're doing cold calls, if you're doing things like that, test to see if a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we'll get better results. People might ask, well, why is it why? Why is there a spike? And I'll kind of walk through a couple of things. So especially. House seller or someone that is in distress with the property that they're looking to sell could be a piece of land as well. Oftentimes they want to use their weekends to enjoy life. They kind of want to check out during the weekend and then Monday starts to roll around and that problem becomes front and center. They were there. All started to test putting out some of your marketing message, gentlemen, to do it. But directly related to COVID, which you see here, is this. So right here and I'm gonna be a verbalizing here, right around the eight, nine, ten, eleven twelve is when the first stay at home orders really started to hit around the country. That's where California, Oregon, Washington, they all also hit between the 10th and the 15th.

Trevor: And so we saw on our clients websites about a 10 percent dip in overall traffic for two to three weeks after that. So you can see about 10 percent of the traffic buyers and sellers, they kind of said, hey, we're not sure what's going on. We're gonna kind of pull back some of our activities, probably trying to figure out what the heck is happening, you know, and how to how do we cope with it as a family. But here's the cool thing. After that initial shock of those first two weeks, where were traffic dips? Traffic back got back up to normal and now it's actually over where it was. More sellers, more buyers are seeing solutions online than before the COVID stuff even happened.

Joe: So that upward trending chart. Even though it's going up and down on weekends. But it's trending up.

Trevor: It's trending up. And here's the important thing. Now, I know there's a lot of negativity in the news media. There's a lot of things out there that talk about why things are not going good. But here, this data shows your buyers and sellers are still looking for solutions. And so your clients will hit us up and say, hey, Trever, my Google ads have been converting way less than my cost per lead is higher during this phase. I'm. Guys, why on the other side of what to do about it with your marketing, how to change some of your messaging to make it stand out even better. So over here on the right side now. So the left side of this graph is, is people and sessions. People that are actually landing on these Web sites, buyers and sellers over here, it's conversion. And once again, these are mostly sellers.

Trevor: Conversions is what conversion for senator or from the people that landed on those Web sites, which was actually submitted their information on the Web form as a full lead. And you can see here the state homeowners hit right here, right around that same time that your 10th level, 12th 13/14 and conversions didn't just take a 10 percent debt. They actually took about a twenty to twenty five percent difference. So as soon as stay at home orders hit, conversion percentage conversion rate got knocked about twenty five percent down. Now it's still the majority of people are still filling out the forms. They didn't cut conversions in half or seventy five percent. It bumped them down about 25 percent. And people might be saying, well, why is that? Does that mean I should shut my marketing off? The high level is what we found from talking with sellers and is really digging into more data is many sellers and buyers, too.

Trevor: They still have the problem. Right over on the left side. It shows you demand is actually increasing during this time, but conversions decreased because people just aren't sure what to do. Why do I want to fill out this information and have someone come in my house? I don't know if I want someone to come in my house from now, but during this COVID stuff. I don't know where I would move. Can I even move anywhere if my state is in a stay at home order. So you've got an increased demand for sellers and buyers right now. You've got a slightly decreased demand in people filling out the information. So there's this gap right now. People still have the demand for some of them are holding off on submitting information. Now, here's the opportunity. There's some real estate investors that I've talked to, even really experienced ones are trimming back some of their paid marketing budget because they're getting more clicks. And I'll show you guys some PPC data or in second.

Trevor: They're getting more clicks. PPC traffic is actually even increasing right now, but their conversion rate is lower because some of the people holding back. And so their cost per lead has gone up a little bit. And some of them are starting to pull out of Google ads, even some Facebook ads. And that's the worst thing you should do. The thing that you need to be doing right now is getting your message in front of these prospects more than ever. You need to be getting content in front of them and adjust the top of your Web site so it says something about COVID. It really address it in the top of your Web site, whether you're going after land or house sellers and specifically say, hey, we understand the times are crazy, but we are still buying houses right now. We're still making offers. If you're in a market where there's a lot of ibuyers, all for the major ibuyers, stop buying right now. They'll come back, but they're not buying right now. And so they're just buoyed. In some markets like Raleigh, North Carolina, seven point eight percent of all homes sold in twenty nineteen were from ibuyers. So in that market, upwards of seven to 10 percent of the whole house I buyers would have been buying right now are on the market for investors and agents to now serve those sellers.

Trevor: So right now buy those eyeballs with ads getting from those eyeballs with content that build trust and credibility and say, hey, we're local. So we didn't bail even though the eye buyer would stop buying locally, we didn't bail because we're local. We understand the market. We want to serve you. Not just when it's convenient for us to make a profit, but when you know we're here to help serve you. And last thing before I turn this over to you Joe it's really important right now. You also create content. What's Joe doing? Joe's been putting on a lot of great content because he's getting in front of the market. He's building trust and expertise. He's building authority. So now when you guys have something that you're needing that Joe can solve, you're going to reach out to him because he is your authority. You're seeing the content.

Trevor: And the most successful real estate investors that are doing this right now are putting out content, putting on videos on Facebook that are retargeting videos from their ads or from the organic traffic in a Web site that even though conversion rates down now going to follow you over to Facebook with a good series of videos. Hey do you need still need to sell your house during Corona? Hey, here's how we've changed our process during the coronavirus to keep you safe and healthy. And then you're gonna be in front of it four weeks and six weeks, eight weeks with retargeting ads. So when they're ready, you've already built trust and authority and you're going to win the business rather than somebody else.

Joe: That's really good. Do you have examples of you are still in to share your screen there to show this one?

Trevor: One last thing here Joe. At the very start you asked about is SEO dead right? Is getting organic leads dead, right? Yeah. And so this graph kind of dives through this. So this direct thing here. A lot of that. You don't really know how Google comes up. Sometimes it's literally people putting in the actual URL. But most of our data has shown to be corroborated with others, that sometimes up to half is actually organic searches that they're lumping together into a direct bucket. Well, let's go down, you know. So organic searches in this time period, over 400000 people have landed on these Web sites. Paid searches, about the same for thirty five thousand social. There's a lot of social media actually going on. But now let's look over here. So if we if we look at conversion rate so.

Joe: By the way, would a paid Facebook ad driving to your Web site, show up in social? Would that be paid search?

Trevor: That would be paid search. Yeah. Anything on a paid Facebook. So this right here is from a social share or someone clicking a link in there versus an ad. And it all gets passed away from like referral I.D.. So we pick up whatever the referral is.So here, here's the interesting thing here. So if you want to look at the quality of those lead sources, OK? If you're looking at paid so paid search here, this right here would be your Google's. This right here? There could be some Facebook ads, like you said, maybe they are lumping some of it into social. Have to corroborate that and make sure. But on average, your organic search for someone who does a Google search, they're actively seeking out a problem or a solution for their problem. And they can work sometimes almost three times more, almost 300 percent more than a paid or a social media type of lead.

Joe: So if you're looking at the graph here, the organic search conversions are three to four times higher than the paid search conversions.

Trevor: And these percentages people, if you are kind of adept at conversion optimization stuff, you guys might be looking at these percentages and going man in 5 percent. My Web site converts at 20. So if we were to actually only gauge the conversion rate on a landing page or the home page of our systems, it's really built for conversion. Are you going to find a much higher percentage? That percentage there is literally any traffic that came from any source that landed on any page, including a random blog post that they stumbled on. What percentage of those people that land on any page, any traffic source, any time, convert into a lead in the first couple of visits? Let me show you a couple examples. Yeah, for sure. So let me pull up this year. So let me pull up Denver property flip. And this is something here that I want to show you guys. I think you guys should be able to, are seeing Denver property flip?

Joe: I still see your analytics. By the way, why are you pulling that up? Got a few more people that say, hey, I'm here. Joe. Mike? Sean. What's up, Sean? And Guy.. Glad you guys are here. Still not on Facebook yet, but we're on YouTube. Hey, dude. All matters. Youtube is all that matters. Who cares about Facebook.

Trevor: Sorry, here's something I want to show you guys. So this this is a carrot site. Now, they crammed it with a bunch of words and stuff like this.

Joe: Right. Customized. This looks very unique and different, doesn't it?

Trevor: Yeah, it does. Quite a bit. I'll show you some ones that look even more different and convert really well as well. The main reason I want to show this one is less the designs, more the content. Because in Denver, Denver is a really competitive market and this guy is closing leads into deals at a much higher rate than our average client anywhere, but also in Denver. This guy also is getting his leads in deals at a much lower cost than most anyone else in Denver with our data. You start to look at that and go like, why is it? And so let's be getting this call I talked about, especially in this environment where we need to stand out, we can't just say, hey we buy houses, we pay cash, close quickly. Everybody says that. It's like if Wal-Mart and Costco and all them had the exact same value proposition, exact same slogan, if they all had the exact same products, how would you really know where and when to go to Costco, Bush's Wal-Mart versus the local mom and pop? You wouldn't. Right.

Trevor: So they all have different value propositions. And one thing that he's done in his market is that we've been advocating for years, Joe. And we're seeing it more and more is the industry is coming together like you have the retail side and one side thing at the wholesale side and the other. And they've been very, very separate for years. And now with the ibuyers kind of coming in in the middle in this massive inefficiency happening. The real estate transaction, or if you were to ask the 100 out of 100 home sellers, would they rather list their house in the market and do all that requires for that? Would they rather get a fair cash offer? I think 100 out of 100 would say they'd rather get a fair cash offer. They don't want to go through the traditional process or traditional process is broken.

Trevor: The only reason that most houses sell through the traditional process is because it's more mainstream and that's where they can usually get the most money for their transaction if they're willing to wait. Right. So what this guy did is he came up the different guy properties. He said, I'm going to guarantee I can pay the most money. I'm gonna guarantee we pay more than any other investor in the market and put more cash in your pocket than anybody. And so if you put a mark out there, if you put a message out there that shows this, man, it really stands out. Right. You get a cash offer in under 24 hours for full market value without doing a single repair. Why can we pay more than other Denver investors? Learn why we can offer twenty to thirty thousand hours more than anyone else for your house. When you start to see this as a seller versus the traditional, hey we'll buy your house and this is a fundamentally different value.

Joe: Here's a cool thing. It's got a picture in the background of a moving truck. People have pictures of a beat-up house or a junky early house or something like that. But I like that it's a picture of a moving truck.

Trevor: Exactly. Here's a couple things I'll point out here. This certainly you guys can all do and I'll show a couple other examples and answer some questions if you guys want. But the big thing here is this guy's is his offering is fundamentally different. He has a real estate agent license and he's got an agent on staff. So if the person wants retail, he truly is able to serve them. He doesn't throw those leads away. So that enables him to pay more for his marketing and outbid his competitors when he needs to use his to profit more from you believe. Number two, he goes in there and he does offer a cash offer like a traditional investor would, or he might do creative types of deals like you guys do very often. But then he comes in with a third offer. A lady calls a fixed list and in a market that's really hot. He goes in there with his money, with his construction crew, and he says, well, this house could list in the market for three thousand and it could sell pretty quick. But if we were able to put twenty five thousand into this, fixing the kitchen up and this and this, we believe it could sell really fast for three seventy five.

Trevor: And what we're willing to do is we'll put in the twenty five, get it fixed up. I'll bring my crew in. We'll put lien on the home and then we'll split the extra. We'll split that extra 50 thousand bucks down the middle after I get my money back. And then we'll take the 3 percent on the normal on the upfront $300000 that you normally want to sell it for. And so the sellers look at this. Go, man. So you're going to put money into fix my house for me. You going to bring the construction crew in and you're going to pay me an extra twenty five thousand dollars than I would have made if I just was with an agent. And he's like, yeah. And so if you're landing on this site like this, you'll think it seems too good to be true. It's actually better than it seems. And he's got a video. We ended up getting an extra thirty thousand dollars in the end and they risked their money. I got 15 thousands more for selling with whatever profits if it was sold for more than it was worth. If you start to look at this versus the traditional site that just talks about a cash offer, you know, you're like this. Go, man, I need to work with them.

Trevor: Let me show a couple more examples. This is Gabriel Garcia. Gabriel's had a custom site for a while. And then with the COVID stuff, you know, we they put a COVID bar at the top in their care site that essentially says, hey, we're still buying properties. And then it links to a blog post below. And they're in Florida. They've had a custom site for years. So he's been ranking well, but it just didn't fit the page speed wasn't as fast as it should have been. All kinds of stuff like that. And so same thing. When you're trying to stand out in this market, how do you make it so it's not just you get a cash offer or bring in credibility, bring in testimonials. Bring in a lot more of that stuff. Talk about how you really impact your community, what's unique to you guys. So they talk about their community impact. And then this here is this is all done on the carrot side.

Joe: And so that that site does not look like a typical carrot site.

Trevor: No, this is all done in the carrot site. But the big thing is make it yours or emigrated out. Let me show one more. Morse's a land one. This one here hasn't doesn't have a lot of customization on it. They threw a new picture in there. Express Land Offers is a national land buying company and they have a ton of leads in here. So if we were to show this right here, over a thousand sellers have submitted in the past year and a half to have an offer on their on their fish property through this website. How many in the last year? A thousand. Wow. Eleven hundred sellers have submitted and the majority of it's organic SEO. So if I was in Oregon, those the type sell my land fast organ, which that might be one of those things I might type it. I'm looking to sell.

Trevor: You can see some people bidding for these up here. These people are paying to be here. And then there's someone that's got a Web site there. And then there's this one here and there's other ones down here. So that's a carrot site there. And this is the express land offers the ranked number two Google for Oregon. But then you look at every other state that they're into they're ranked really high in Google for all the states that they're in. And they just pop in, updated some photos. Got a good video in there. Builds credibility. Use our land buying guides. It's already in there. And it's really sort of plow. And how can we have more and more credibility to this site and leverage Carrot's high-performance. So you can see they built out location pages for every market that they're in when they're bringing in, I mean, tons and tons and tons of land leads. Excellent for sure. I could show sites all day long. But what I what I'd love to do is if there's any questions people have on what you guys can do right now, I'll give you a very clear action plan right now on exactly what you guys can do content wise. So the first thing I would do is don't cut your marketing off. Your marketing is your life blood.

Trevor: With real estate. What happens is, of course, oftentimes it's a it's a 30 to 90, 30 to 120 day delay in your pipeline. And so the marketing you're doing today is what creates your pipeline. 30, 60, 90 days out. And so if there are investors out there saying, ah, man, I'm kind of nervous or my cost per leads going up a little bit. I'm going to cut that down or cut it off. What's going to happen is you're going to cut off your potential for earning in 30, 60, 90 days. The next thing is the investors that are able to keep content in front of people, the next two to four weeks, the next two to six weeks, during this coronavirus stuff, our data already showed you guys our data show you demand is actually up. More people are searching, more sellers are searching. Conversions down, which is going to drive your cost the lead up in some respects, sometimes not always. OK, so that doesn't mean cut it down. It doesn't mean people don't want my service. It means they're not ready to act now. Some of them aren't. So that's where we. We create three simple videos and put them on Facebook for retargeting.

Trevor: The first video is a very short video. You can even do with your cell phone. That's literally, hey, I'm Trevor with X, Y, Z homebuyer's. And we understand you probably want to sell your house right now in the Phoenix market, but you're not sure. Can you sell it during the rotavirus stuff on the walk you through how we're still buying houses in our process and how we protect you? Now, if your family and one of the things could be that you let them move, you'll let them move and this is all over, you let them stay in the house until whatever is July or whatever. Okay, great. A few seconds into this that. The next thing that I would do is get some content that is related to credibility and testimonials. So if you have done deals, either get those videos from your case studies like the Denver property flip guy and start to put those put these into your Facebook retargeting campaigns.

Trevor: So now someone has landed on your site. They may not be converting as much I rate, but they're going to see your videos on Facebook for the next three weeks, six weeks, eight weeks. And by the time they're ready to sell, they're like man. And I've been seeing Eric in front of me a lot. He seems like a great dude. He solves their problem. I'm gonna reach out to him. And so what we predict, Joe, is is going back to the data. We predict once all the stay at home orders soften or lifts, that conversion is actually gonna pop. I predict that's going to go up higher than it normally is and it's going to level back down to normal. And so if you guys are not getting content in front of people right now and in putting a blog post specific to COVID on your Web site, we've got our automated content system that has automated articles right there inside of our system.

Joe: Talk about how that works. Would you automated because I've been interested in this as well. Automated content. What?

Trevor: For sure. Let me show you this really quick. So as an example, let's see who's selling a house.

Joe: Again, guys, if you want to see this video, what we're talking about, if you're listening to this podcast, I'll describe kind of what we're seeing here. But if you want to go to my YouTube channel, just go to the YouTube and type in Joe McCall, call and ignore all of the bad videos you see about me. And then look for this podcast here and you'll see it and do a search for the word Trevor. And you'll see this video I'm doing right now with Trevor.

Trevor: I love it. So one thing that's happening for sure is, is there's people like this, this gal here, finally.. So even during COVID-19, number one, if people are landing on your Web site from your offline marketing, you need to give them comfort that you're still able to sell it or help them buy their house. Number two, what about the people that are searching right now to go, hey, can I. Can I actually still buy or sell a home during COVID stuff? And so the way that you can stand out all is with content that the winners in a cluttered market are the ones who are authorities. So the ones who are building and thought you are seen as the person that is not just an expert, but a person is the authority in your localized market. And the only way to build authorities with content. Like I'll pay someone a hundred bucks today if they're if you guys know of another way to build authority other than content. It's either like this content, Joe and I are doing where we're putting out something to one to many. It could be you sitting across the coffee shop table from somebody which you can't do right now. Right. That's it. We used to be able to do a month ago. You know, you can't do right now. So online is the spot. Read the content.

Trevor: So this gal here, Shamika, Mika Fox, she's been she kind of. She is going crazy with this in a good way. She's doing a daily video with the system we call video post on how they're you doing, shelter-in-place in Santa Cruz. And she's starting the Google rankings for some of this stuff. And all she's doing is this. She pulls up her camera and you guys don't have to do shelter-in-place stuff. You can do whatever topics. She pulls up her camera, does a three to five, three to eight minute video uploaded to YouTube. OK. So this is a nine minute video and that's fine. The reason I say three to five feet, eight minutes is the average person speaks one hundred and twenty one hundred and sixty words a minute. If you want to have something rank well in Google where your best prospects are searching. Google wants to see the blog post be at least five hundred eight hundred words in order to be enough robust content to give it a chance to rank. And so if you take a video instead of writing like I don't like writing, but I can shoot a quick video, you know, you take the video, yank all the words out of the video. Now, a five minute video is an eight hundred word article. A three minute video was a 500 word article. Kind of puts you in a sweet spot. This one here, a nine minute video is going to be probably a twelve or thirteen hundred word article.

Joe: Now, she's telling these people on the video, too. Hey, if you want a house to sell, you have a house you want to sell, go here.

Trevor: On some of them. So her biggest thing right now is to try to get in front of people, because what she did, she's amazing at Facebook. So she gets people over here, she pixels them. And then she delivers them her ads for her niche. Her niche-based videos on and great at this neighborhood as an agent. Great at this for. Here's how to do this. So some of them she does say that, but some of these two, she's really not. Right here. Does say you're Santacruz real estate expert. This is more kind of branding. And then she can follow them back over on Facebook more. But what she's doing then is she's submitting these to our system called video posts. And so what video post does is you take one of these videos and only find one that she did with the local business owner. This applies to investors, too. So this one here, Adam Brower, of EKam Eatery. And so rather than her sitting down a writing content, which content is the way you stand out and build authority in your local market. She did a zoom video with Adam. She submitted it to our feature called Video Post, which takes which automatically takes you on YouTube. Yanks all the words out of the video. Wow. Transcribes it, makes an article for you and sends you an email and says, here are your articles ready.

Trevor: And so she's creating one to two of these a day right now. And even if you were to, like Google, this dude's name and his company's name. So if you're looking for his company and if you're a real estate agent and this is a great strategy for an investor, it works as well. Guys, she's ranked number two in Google behind his own LinkedIn page. And in her YouTube video for is ranked number three. So all she did was created a five minute video with them. I guess this is twelve. She had it transcribed automatically to our video post feature clicked, publish. It was done. And she's taking over that ranking for his company name, which is awesome. Let me show you another example here.

Trevor: I'll show you Grand Realty Brand Investments. This guy's an investor agent. He's an investor agent out of Eugene, Oregon. He's doing really, really well. So he's gone through customize this site. He does a similar type of model that Eric does where he talks about I mean, I can buy it with the cash offer. I can do it fix and list. I'm an agent. And he does really, really well there. But he started to create content and I don't know if he's got blog post up here, but let me go check out this Facebook page because he took our advice. He said, OK, I'm gonna start and create a video piece of video content to talk about what's happening in the market. I'm going to put them up as ads and I'm going to put him in the Carrot system for content that starts to get ranked well in Google, from my best prospects. Let me see if I can see the one that you did the other day. Let's see this one right here. So he did a piece of content, video content on Hey, Zillow is not buying now. Zillow stops buying in Portland, Oregon. Local cash homebuyers is still buying. This one video is as over a hundred and forty one views posted. You know, that kind of stuff is going to help you guys stand out with authority.

Joe: You know, realtors, don't you agree with this? Sometimes, Trever, like realtors understand this a lot better than investors do. There's a few things that realtors do better than investors. One of them is content marketing, you know, because these real stake, realtor coaches and brokerages and they're always harping on this get out there in social media, create content. And I think this is something a lot of investors need to start learning how to do themselves, because you may think I'm only going to get one hundred views. That's significant. You know, and that stuff grows. It can go out there. You can repurpose this content. You might put it on Facebook, but you can then put it on YouTube. When that grows, turn it into articles, put them on your blog, you start building an email list. You could even start e-mailing sellers, the new videos that you're creating and stuff like that. So this is important stuff, really important.

Trevor: And also one more thing, man, and then I'll toss it back to you. So that one thing that I showed you, there is one way to create easy, simple content that you can repurpose into YouTube, which like I showed you before with Sheneka is her YouTube videos, ranked number 3 and Google for that guy's company name, which is cool. But then how you can put it in your video post feature, which creates written articles for you without you having to write the content yourself, the number three. Another way that you can create content easily right now, and at the very least, if you're a care customer, this is already here. You can schedule these epic journey, the for events marketing plan. If you're not a care customer, though, go away and write an article right now around COVID. So here, here's a couple here. Can you still sell your house during the Corona virus pandemic in Roseburg, Oregon?

Trevor: And so our system takes this article. It spins, it puts your city in there, makes all the all tags and everything, you know, dialing for it for your city, puts your company in there, puts your phone number in the political action at the bottom, all that stuff. And so this article here is actually getting ranked and Google for some people. Now, people might ask, well, what if it's the same articles, 14 of the people, my city. Usually the first person that publishes is going to get to get the edge if no one edits their content. But what our best clients do is instead of investing an hour or two into researching content topic and writing and publishing it. And use this to go, cool. I'm going to use this. I'm going to spend 10 minutes going in here. Adjusting the content a little bit, adding a paragraph of my own, adding my own picture on the schedule. And then that helps you really stand out as you took your content marketing from an hour or two down to a less than 10 to 15.

Trevor: But this right here is something people are posting on Facebook. Some of them are getting it ranked and Google really, really well for that phrase. Can you still sell your home during a corona virus in Eugene, Oregon? Things like that are seeking to automate these bad boys up in our system weekly. You pick a content back, whether it's coded, related or not, and go call the scheduler. One article a week or system spins it for. You can go in there and edit them up and tweak if you want to insert to build that authority into that content. I'll show you one last example. Powerful. And then we'll wrap this focus. There's a client of his name named House Heroes in House Heroes. They are really, really good at what we feature. Here's the ads. If we were going to sell me guiltiest so much land. So if you're to Google this straight up, sell my land, which is very generic, very broad. The number one organic result in Google for sell my land, because the way that our system is set up and it gives you an advantage with SEO is a carrot site.

Trevor: Now, I don't know if these are I could click and see that is a carrot site so I can see the icon, other ones in here, like the carrot sites as well. That's something that we're just really good at. So now let's go. Here it was. Click this. So this takes directly to a page on their Web site set up on our system. And they've got their own COVID 19 banner up here making people comfortable. Hey, we are still buying. That's bumping up their conversion rate. But then people come in here, they see this big, long piece of content. They see the credibility. They learn that they can sell their land. They went in here and modify their content. Now, how is this producing results? Let's go. Go and take a look at this. We see results. So how they buys houses and they buy land. You know, this is a view that you guys wouldn't see normally. It's a view that I can see examining the company. But this right here, this one, over 4000, almost 5000 leads, I think that's their land lead. This one right here is land. So over the past two and a half years. Twenty four hundred land sellers have submitted on that form. Twenty four hundred.

Trevor: This year of the twenty four hundred. This is the step two form. Of the twenty four hundred, twenty three o eight of them filled out more and gave more information about their property than just the property address, phone and e-mail. So like 90 percent said, let me give you even more information about it because I want to sell this lot. Now let's pop over here to stats and show you guys where this is coming from. So number one, they used our system to get it ranked high in Google. Make it convert well. There's a lot of factors why it ranks high. Let's pop over here and look at the last 30 days. And what you'll find, Joe, is a good hunk of the traffic is actually coming from blog posts. It's actually coming from not the home page. So you can see hundred and twenty eight leads, land seller leads the past thirty days through that one page from that Google search. And so does Google search still work? Yeah, a lot. So just refresh. That was old data. So here we go. So eighty seven leads up through that page right here. This is interesting.

Trevor: So  how to sell a home with unpermitted construction. My guess is all that traffic is coming from people going to Google's typing up how to sell a home with unpermitted construction. It didn't pull in a lot of leads, but now they're able to retarget these people back on Facebook and capture those leads. This right here, a blog post selling an inherited property with siblings. It's got leads in the past 30 days. Right here selling a house by owner in Florida. The dos and don'ts of selling vacant land. I've got nine leads in the last 30 days. So we can keep on going on and on. Here's another one. Pack tips when selling a house in Florida. These are types of phrases most investors aren't even trying to compete against or trying to compete with. We buy houses, we buy land. Sell my house fast. Sell land fast. And these guys are going after the more drilled down phrases that are easier to rank for. You just create content with using our system. They also are way higher quality leads. Like these people are going to convert a away higher rate. This article they wrote three years ago, three years ago is ranked number one and Google for the phrase tax tips on selling houses in Florida. And this generates leads almost every month for them through their Carrot platform. These guys close tons and tons of deals.

Joe: Summarize this. Wrap it up. Bottom line, what are the tips that you advised people, Trever, in this market on how to reach more homeowners who want to sell their house or buyers want to buy a house? How do you what are some of the highlight points would you summarize this with in terms of creating content in changing your message?

Trevor: For sure. The first one that I want to toss out, guys, no matter what marketing you're doing, if you're doing direct mail, cold calling, adjust your messaging. So rather than sending out the exact same direct mail piece you're normally sending out, adjust your copy on it. So it says how to sell your house during rotavirus. Is it still safe to sell it? How to get a cash offer during COVID 19. But move out when it's all over. So adjust your messaging on everything, including the top of your site because you've seen people researching more and more. But but they have a lower act to just take the action because they're not sure what they should do. They don't want people coming in their house right now to change the message. Number two is with that, make sure you guys are doing some sort of remarketing or retargeting, because when you're when you're grabbing at attention because of the conversion rate is a little bit lower. Get content over on Facebook. They're going to see every time they go to Facebook for the next 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, so when they're ready, you're that you're the expert. They saw your short video that said, hey, you're here in Tampa.

Trevor: You might be considering selling your house, but you're wondering, can I sell it right now or is it safe to sell it on to walk you through a four minute video on Facebook on how to do that? I'm going to drive you to our Web site. That's number two is we're just your marketing message. Number two is get retargeting ads up in front of them. A couple simple videos show. Number three is as you're moving forward, whether it's COVID- 19 or not. The market's going to get tighter, is going to get it's going to get a little bit tougher. And the ones who are going to win, the ones we're seeing are doing the most predictable, consistent businesses are the ones that are using content, because now not everyone is saying the same thing. It's not just a buy. Your house will pick Ashika as quickly. Yeah, we do. But let me show you some extra context and how we're an authority in this so we stand out versus the others. And the only way to build authorities by putting out consistent content. Last thing is now how do you put it out? Well, that's your choice. You can love writing that house heroes guy. He loves writing, so he likes sits down and writes long articles and he use our content automation to do extra. So Shanika and myself, I love videos. I don't want to write. So I just take out my camera to record a three to eight minute video every week and upload its YouTube, get on the Carrot and give myself a better chance rank. So put out content every week, guys. It's going to stand out as a market starter.

Joe: Good. It's a long-term investment, but it reaps long term rewards. Very good. Something really important I got to talk about here. John posted this comment. Hey, Joe, whatever happened to the park rangers in your backyard? OK. I was doing a podcast. I was. I forget what happened, but I was always out with my wife. My kids were at home all this and they text us. We were we just wanted to get out of the house. And like, we don't care if we have to sit in line for 45 minutes at Starbucks in the drive thru, we're gonna get a coffee. And all of a sudden my kids text me like, dad, there's three park rangers in our backyard. We back to a state park and once. So we like race home. And then by the time we get here, they're gone and they give us a business card and like, call us like, oh, my gosh, what's going on? So I told my podcast about it on my videos or something like that. And now people are asking me what happened?

Joe: I don't know what happened. I called the lady back and she's not returned my call. And I'm kind of relieved. I don't want to know. Me and my boys and my girls, we were we did kinda cut a trail through the thick, heavy underbrush into the state park. So maybe maybe she saw some maybe she saw a trail and was wondering like, what did you guys do? It's just like this really bad invasive species of huckleberry. Ah, not huckleberry. Honey, how I can never remember the name of it. It is really thick, heavy underbrush that we need to cut through. So anyway, those of you wondering, this is not even anything to do with what we were talking about with our guest Trevor.

Trevor: Whatever happened with the park rangers? That's awesome.

Joe: So we don't know if nothing's happened yet. And I know. I'm kind of glad. I know. Anyway, so, guys, if you want to get more information about Trevor and what they're doing over at Carrot, go check out JoeLikesCarrots.com. And they have an amazing service. And I know a lot of people get tripped up on this. But I wanted to just remind you again, don't think that your Web site has to look like everybody else's. All right. There are a lot of different themes and templates that you can use. You can get in there and customize it, make it look different in your own. That's a big thing to remember. And number two, Carrot has a lot of extra services that you can utilize to help you create content and to update it. And they have really world class education on how to bring leads to your Web site, whether it's organic traffic or page traffic or content through social media and all that stuff. They've really, really good training that can help you learn how to do that stuff better. So go check it out. Joe likes carrots dot com. I'd be recommending them even even if I didn't know Trevor, because it's just a great company. It's a great service. The gay guys have been doing this six years now. Is that right, Trevor?

Trevor: It's crazy, man. And we started the start of 20, 2014.

Joe: Wow. Well, good. I'm glad you've been on the show. Thank you so much. Any parting final words, Trevor?

Trevor: I think the biggest thing, guys and gals, as is continue to follow Joe, because as we go into whatever this market becomes at the next three, six and twelve months, you've got to get creative with the way you do deals. And one of things I loved about Joe. All the content he's always put out is it's always creative ways to do the deals. It's usually not the cut and dry. The same thing that everyone else is doing. And so you've got to adapt those methods. Go grab the lease option book, go grab all that stuff he's got because it's going to help you show up that sellers has been able to solve their problem in a unique way that your competitor might not be able to your own job. Thank you, man.

Joe: Thank you. And J.F., thank you very much. It's honeysuckle. You ever heard of honeysuckle? Do you have that in Oregon?

Trevor: We do. And we don't have any on the property. But it smells amazing when you walk by it.

Joe: Well, it is bringing you stupid, obnoxious, looks like creates…And then they get these vines that climb up the trees and kill the trees and you can't see the trees. As honeysuckles going through. So anyway. All right. Hey, guys, go check out JoeLikesCarrots.com. Thank you, Trevor, for being on the show. You're a good friend. Appreciate everything you're doing for the industry. Keep up the good work, man.

Trevor: Thank you, man. Likewise. Guys have an amazing rest of the week. And every time if there's anything we can help with tons of free content, we have an entire podcast. Yeah, we have a good podcast. We have an entire series actually that I've been doing every week since COVID started. Every Friday morning I publish a new podcast talking exactly how to not just wade through this COVID situation, but actually how to come out even stronger. So just Carrot cast. I can look at the carrot cast and look at that whole COVID series that talk about exact types of content to do exactly what you do to page marketing right now. Exactly. It's adjusting some mindset shifts as well. Dopiest comment is even stronger.

Joe: Check it out. Nice. Thank. Thank you. Check out the Carrot cast as Trevor’s podcast. We'll see you guys later. Thank you, guys. Yep.