Demystifying Content Marketing for Real Estate with Carrot: In-Depth Insights and Strategies

The difference is if we were hanging out, if I'm in Portland and you and I are hanging out and I'm like, let's grab sushi. I'm going to, I'm going to probably going to go, hey Siri, what sushi restaurants are nearby? Or I'm going to go to Google Maps or maybe Google. And I'm going to look at the top one, their Google Business Profile. I'm going to see, do they have good reviews and is it close? And that's all that matters. And that's the way most people think about standing out online. But for a motivated seller, like you're talking about, it's totally different. They're gonna, they're gonna go into the organic search results. They're gonna click multiple results and they're gonna do their research. They're dealing with a decision that's life-altering, big, expensive, and scary. And so they're gonna want to explore their options. Think about how much research we do, like you and I as people, when we spend a few hundred bucks or a thousand bucks on a mattress or three grand, I don't know. What people spend on mattresses. Anyways, I know how much research I did on a mattress. Now, how much more research are you going to do when you're selling a house? And so anyways, standing out in Google matters. And then the credibility and the content on your website, like being able to educate a lead. That's the goal of the website. You want it to show up and you want it to educate them about your process, how it works. You want to build trust and credibility with them so that by the time you get on the phone with them, they're predisposed to work with you. I think that's the thing a lot of investors miss.

Welcome to the She's Got Assets Real Estate Investing Podcast. I'm the host, Shona Leppis. Follow along as we unpack and demystify real estate investment strategies through expert interviews and personal experience. From how to find off-market deals to creative financing to long-term and midterm rentals, we aim to educate and inspire others to gain financial freedom and generational wealth through real estate. And as always, please subscribe so you never miss an episode. We really appreciate reviews. It helps others find us. And it just helps us get found.

Hook, why should people listen to this?

Oh, what's my hook? I used to be more general. I think now my hook is that I want to get into the details and not just talk about you have 200 doors and it was super easy, like how you got there and just, yeah, unpacking stuff more. I don't have a good answer for it. I guess I hope it's a good conversation and you'll hear stuff you won't hear in other podcasts, right? There's more, it's more in-depth conversations.

If I were you, let me ask, do you record after you're done recording the podcast? Do you ever do like an intro bumper of like, hey, I just had this conversation with Brady and we talked about X, Y, Z. Do you ever do that?

I should. I, I'm too lazy, but I know I should.

It's okay. It's, it's not lazy. You don't have to. I don't do those. I, I did a little bit of it back in the day, but the inverse of that is you can say, hey, I've got Brady here. He's He's good at, he's good at content marketing. He loves generating leads for investors. And so we're going to talk about lead gen and AI. Even something like that at the front end would like something for people to go, okay, this is what I'm going to get.

I love that because it gives you an immediate sense of what to expect and then it's just the conversation is okay.

Exactly. That's a good way to put it. I haven't heard, I'm thinking hook in my head and thinking, oh, most people know what hook means, but That's more specific. An immediate sense of what to expect.

Yeah.

Okay. What are you gonna—

You just did your own intro, Brady, but yeah.

And this is the part of the conversation.

So I have this— welcome to the Ask a Podcast. I have Brady here from Carrot. He is a good friend and he is a content strategist. So we, we always nerd out when we talk to each other. It's like a really fun conversation. So Brady, we just unpacked that we're gonna talk about. But yeah, essentially we're gonna talk about content and what Carrot does and why Carrot is an amazing tool. Just a little backstory, like I've been a full-time investor for about 4 years and I did a course and it was all about door knocking and ringless voicemail and SMS messages and all of those things. I just, my skin kind of crawled and I was like, tried to do it, just did not feel right in my head and my heart. And then I, some call like Carrot came up. I was like, what's that? And then I found it and I was like instantly This is a tool I love, so we'll unpack it more, but I'm, I'm a huge fan of Carrot. I also just love, I think the culture at Carrot is, I don't know how that affects the software, Brady, but like everyone is so just nice and loves the product and Trevor has just built an amazing culture. And to me that's really important and I, it's a brand I, I really believe in. So for what it's worth, but welcome Brady.

I appreciate that. Thanks, Shona. Thanks. I, I love hearing, I love hearing that. It's funny because I was just talking with someone last week who's been with us for years. Someone, you know, a friend of ours. And I was like, what do you love about Karat? Like, why do you still use Karat? There's other options. And he's like, man, just love the team, love the support, love the culture you guys have built. And I'm like, it's such a weird thing. I was like, culture isn't really in the software. We're a software company, but I don't know. I'm really honored that people still want to work with us just for being good people.

Yeah, but it kind of has part in, you know, get help and if The Carat cams, like that's where you see the culture and just, I don't know, it just engenders a lot of like trust and yeah, but you're right. It doesn't really, software. Yeah. But we did go to the software part too, but I just like, when I was thinking about what to ask you, I'm like the culture and it's just very intentional and I think there's a real mission behind it and that's, that really stands out and the support and the way you guys are always. On that note, like if someone has not heard of Carat, like What's the nutshell? Why is it amazing? Like, I—

yeah, my, my 20-second elevator pitch for Carrot is we, we, we just make it really easy to get a website up as a real estate investor, real estate agent, or even if you're in home services, make it fast and easy to get a website up that's going to perform. And we give you the tools to succeed and the help and support, the training to succeed. Now, where most people go wrong is they'll throw up like a basic website, a Wix website or Squarespace website, or they'll pay a few grand to a developer. And that website doesn't perform. By perform, I mean it doesn't always convert visitors into leads. Maybe it's slow, clunky, clunky, and it's not optimized to capture leads predictably. And/or it's not easy to get it to rank in search results so you can get inbound leads. We make both of those things a heck of a lot easier. Instead of just saying, okay, here's a page to exist online. Like it actually has to work for you. So that's what we do.

I think that's a really good point. Like back in the day, I used to be a web developer. I used to hand code stuff.

I forgot that. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm like the OG, right? I even worked at an ISP back in the day.

Oh man. Yeah. I've built websites too. I've built a few. I used to build them on Wix, but when Wix was new and then I've done a couple with custom WordPress and it sucks. There's a lot of steps. There's a lot of steps.

And let me tell you, when WordPress came out, it was like amazing, but I blew up a few WordPress sites by pressing the wrong button. Like there was really, It's, you can really mess up your site. And I just really want to underscore the performance thing because building a basic website, no one's going to look at it. No one's going to pull it up. Nobody really cares. And so what Carrot does is get, gets you found in the SEO piece and the content. So I'd love to hear you unpack that more because I almost feel like don't bother unless you do it the right way. That's my opinion. Unless you just want a vanity site, right?

Yeah, exactly. I guess going back to what I was saying about like, you, you could build a website anywhere else, but. Doing a custom website on WordPress, for one, you got to think about all the technical things like the, what plugins do I need? How am I not going to get hacked? What's the best hosting? So there's a lot of, there's a lot of small decisions wrapped into having a website. And then the other mistake would be going with Wix or Squarespace where it's not geared towards a specific industry. It's not optimized to rank for SEO. So anyways, there's a lot of switching costs and decisions involved with like How the heck am I even going to get the website up? But anyways, sorry, I'm going down a rabbit hole. What was the original question?

Just why, why care? And to your point, like, very overwhelming. And those, those plugins expire, you can get hacked, like it is not something, and you don't want to change your, your hosting and all that stuff is just not easy. So it's just, yeah.

So that's where I was going. Yeah. So you have the tech side of things and you have the content side of things. So we've solved for both of those. So basically when you launch a Care website, because you're a Care member, you can get the website up and running in a few minutes. Like you can have the website live with all of the different pages, like your homepage, your About Me page, How It Works, our Services. All these pages are already created and populated with the words and images on them. Now we still recommend, hey, if you want this to really convert, You need to go in there, put a picture of yourself, put your logo, put your company name, personalize the text a little bit, add some reviews to it, like especially reviews. That's critical. We can get into credibility if you want, but make it your own. But the point is all of those pages are already created. So a lot of the strategy is already done for you. Whereas if you're building that website somewhere else, you're going to have to think, what am I even going to put on this page? We've all done that. Whereas, okay, I got to— I'm in Wix or whatever. I'm in a website builder. What the heck am I going to type? And you don't just want some AI-generated generic fluffy thing. Like it needs to be geared towards the type of lead you're going after. And so the magic of Karat is you come in, you say, okay, I want a website designed to attract motivated seller leads. Here's the motivated seller lead template. And then here's the design I want to pick. And then boom, all those pages are launched. So we've taken care of the tech part as far as like plugins. Hosting. You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to make decisions there. You're never going to have to worry about your KaratSite getting hacked. It just doesn't happen. That's something if you're on WordPress, it's almost more of a— if it's almost more of a when, not if, if you're in charge of your own website. But anyways, we take care of the tech part of it and then we make the content a lot easier. So the first part of the content is like having those pages created on your website. And then we also have tools to make it really easy to launch pages for specific locations you want to generate leads from, like auto-location pages. And then we have blog posts written by real teams of human writers for certain topics in real estate and things like that. We have an AI rewrite tool in the software to make rewriting faster than going to ChatGPT. But anyways, whole bunch of content tools to make it easy. We're just trying to take all the time suck and decision fatigue out of standing out online, basically.

And I think for someone that maybe doesn't understand this, like when we say motivated sellers, there's lots of ways to get them, right? There's the traditional pulling the list, there's door knocking, there's the distress burger of like all the things, right? But with Carrot, what happens when somebody types into Google, I want to sell my house fast, guess what? You're going to pop up and that's an inbound lead. It's not outbound where you're harassing people to sell their homes that may or may not want to sell no matter what they look like on paper. And that's amazing. Those are such a difference.

The difference is if we were hanging out, if I'm in Portland and you and I are hanging out and I'm like, let's grab sushi. I'm going to, I'm going to probably going to go, hey Siri, what sushi restaurants are nearby? Or I'm going to go to Google Maps or maybe Google. And I'm going to look at the top one, their Google Business Profile. I'm going to see, do they have good reviews and is it close? And that's all that matters. And that's the way most people think about standing out online. But for a motivated seller, like you're talking about, it's totally different. They're gonna, they're gonna go into the organic search results. They're gonna click multiple results and they're gonna do their research. They're dealing with a decision that's life-altering, big, expensive, and scary. And so they're gonna want to explore their options. So think about how much research we do, like you and I as people, when we spend a few hundred bucks or a thousand bucks on a mattress. Or $3,000. I don't know what people spend on mattresses. Anyways, I know how much research I did on a mattress. Now, how much more research are you going to do when you're selling a house? And so anyways, standing out in Google matters. And then the credibility and the content on your website, like being able to educate a lead. That's the goal of the website. You want it to show up and you want it to educate them about your process, how it works. You want to build trust and credibility with them so that by the time you get on the phone with them, they're predisposed to work with you. I think that's the thing a lot of investors miss.

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It's like, fuck, I can get leads anywhere. Like I could just get leads and some investors can, if you just wanna hammer the phone all day and work cold to maybe warm leads, cool. But I'd rather have motivated leads that already trust me, saw my reviews and my videos on my website and just wanna work with me anyways.

And there's just such a difference when that phone rings and they're just, they're very appreciative. They've done their research. It's a very different, I don't know if avatar's the right word, but they're just They're seeking you out and you can't help everyone, but they're just, the table is set in a very different way than you cold calling, harassing. I just, to me it's just, it's night and day and it's not, I think a lot of times investors are scared to talk to liens cuz, but when they're calling you and they need your help and you have a tool to help them, it's very different. It's just, yeah.

It's night and day. There's this weird, even if you're not doing video, like even if you don't have video of yourself on your website, there's this weird like celebrity factor that comes from Having a website and an online presence that's done really well. People get on the phone with you like, oh, Brady, like you're the guy, you're the guy from the podcast. They're like, Shona, you're the gal. I saw you online. I saw your video. I saw your reviews. You're the person. Wow. I actually get to talk with you. How cool is that? There's just so much credibility that comes with standing out online. It's crazy. You close deals way faster and more deals than just having a generic unbranded business.

Yeah. Well, I, I kind of wanna unpack that. I think sometimes we're trying to present ourselves as this like big business, but I feel like the more authentic I am and the more I share a little bit, the more people connect. And there's a balance, right? So I, from a content strategy, how do you weave that in or make yourself more human or authentic or however you wanna say it?

Yeah, it's interesting. To me, it depends on what's the business you want to build, right? Do you want to build a smaller, more low-key business? Or maybe not even small, but do you want to build a business where you're okay with having yourself or at least a small team for the indefinite future? Or do you want to build something really big and do you want to take over your entire market? How much volume do you need to do? I think that's an important question that has to be answered because I see, let me just give you two examples. Another Carrot member, Jeremy Resmer, he's in South Carolina. He's got 2 or 3 different brands. He's got 3 different Carrot websites. Each of those websites have generated over $1 million in revenue from wholesale assignment fees and things like that. And he's got a team. He's taken over different markets and he's spending money on— he's doing SEO really well. He's ranking in Google with Carrot Sites. He's doing a little bit of PPC. He's running a lot of TV ads. He's running radio ads. So he has what we call omnipresent marketing. And you hear about him 7 times before you do business with him. You see his acquisition guy's face, you hear his voice, and it's bam, they're the company. And so they keep hearing the company name over and over. And so that's like a, that's a brand. There's a little bit of that personal touch too, because there's one consistent face in the brand, but it's something like Myrtle. I think it's Myrtle Beach Home Buyers, something like that. But their brand is everywhere. Contrast that, we have companies like, I was gonna say my friend Bo Hollis outta Louisville, I guess his brand is Simply Sold, so it's still a brand, but he's just one guy in front of the brand and he's doing a lot of networking and there's a bunch of other carrot members, but Joe Buys Houses, let's say where it's just built around one guy or Shawna Buys Houses, it's just built around one gal. There are people that they're the face and name of the brand and they close more deals than they can keep up with. They get more leads than they can keep up with. And maybe they only have 1 to 3 marketing channels that are bringing in leads and that's fine. And it's enough for them. So I think I see both work really well, but nothing in the middle works really well. If there's no, if there's no personality and it's just a generic, like, we buy houses. That doesn't work really well. You either got to decide, okay, am I the face? Am I the personality? Is this a mom-and-pop type feel? Or is this a brand? And you can still have like a mom-and-pop brand, or am I a big national brand? You got to decide what you are, but most people are like, here's a website. I'm an investor and I buy houses. Come work with me. There's no unique value proposition. There's no personal, no personality. You know what I mean?

Mm-hmm.

A lot of people just don't think about that. Who am I? What's the feel that I wanna give people when they come to my website or when I do business with them?

And I think that's really important. That goes back to your why and being just intentional about it. And sometimes it takes a while, like it took me a while to figure out all my different brands and things, and now I've really solidified it. But sometimes you just have to do some soul searching and figure it out. But I think being vanilla is just it doesn't, you're not setting yourself apart, right? You're not creating something.

Yeah. The last thing I would say to that is it's easier to, in order to build an asset, you need to build a brand. It's, if you're in this to exit or you're in this to pass it off to a team, it's gonna be very difficult if it's tied to, if there's not a brand associated with it.

Mm-hmm.

So. If I built Brady Buys Houses and it's all built off Brady Winder, it's gonna be a little difficult after— it's gonna be a little bit more difficult versus Oregon Home Buyers, just for example.

That's a good point. You know, in our previous life we had an agency and we actually sold the asset. It was, the asset was, and we, what was not our intention, it was not like we had this great exit strategy, but we sold it and it was because we had a good client base and we built this Basically it was the website that got the leads. That's what they wanted. And that thing is still, I go look at it, it's still up there. So it is an asset. That's a really good point. I think people don't, it's not just a tool, it's part of your business asset. That's very true.

Yeah. Brand, there's real brand equity with having an established business that's around and the website that goes with it. There's real equity there.

Yeah. Yeah. So I love Carrot. This is a little sidetrack, but because I was doing marketing for an agency and blogs were newer and I'm like, we need a blog. I had to like sell it in and like we put blog posts up and it was like pulling teeth to get the content. And, but I definitely would get leads from, and we were pretty small that we positioned ourselves as this kind of larger agency. And the content's what did it. That's what positioned us in that way. So I found Carrie, I'm like, oh, I don't have to write. I knew you have to modify it, but the fact that it came with all that content was just like, After having pulling teeth from the agency side and getting blog posts written and all the content strategy and editorial, it looks like a miracle or something.

Oh yeah. That was one of the first things we did. I would say we, it was before I've been with Carrot about 6 years. It was before I was around, but it was like, okay, the problem is people don't have the time to write blog posts from scratch. They don't know what to write about. And yeah, we just started coming up with the topics that we knew investors wanted and needed on their website. And so we have. Writers write 'em and you go in and modify 'em, tweak 'em, and set 'em live on your site. Yeah.

Yeah. And even if you love to write, coming up with the topics and, and also the ones that are SEO optimized, like it's a real strat— it's not just, there's a lot of strategy that goes into that.

Yeah. Yeah. What are some of the topics that you picked to put on your website early on?

I think I was just so excited. And let in and went a little crazy because like it was just like pulling teeth to get when I was the agency side.

Yeah.

So I just, yeah, but it was motivated sellers. Just, I want to basically for anyone listening, it's whatever someone's typing in Google, we want to be answering those questions, right? That's the idea with content is that we are a resource and then Google sees you as a resource. So it serves up your content, right? In a nutshell.

Yeah. Should I work with an investor or an agent? Trevor and I did a podcast last week. Trevor's our CEO, for those listening. We were doing a podcast talking about like blog posts, different blog post topics, like real weird niche ones that people are showing up in Google for. And one of them was around like, how much will an investor pay for my house? That's something we found people are typing into Google that not a lot of people are answering.

Wait.

And so there's lots of weird little ones like that. Another one we found was, can I sell a house? Can I sell a house while my spouse is in prison? Can I sell a house with termite damage? Can I sell a meth house? There's so many different things people are going to Google and typing in every day. And these are like the lower volume, really specific niche ones. There's volume for those and people are closing deals from those. It's crazy. And those aren't even the popular terms.

But it's easier to rank for a more niche kind of topic versus something that's just really popular. So how would one go about narrow down the content, how to go about doing that research. I know there's a lot of ways, but—

Yeah, the simplest, easy, free way is to just go to Google and type in— just put yourself in the mind of your prospect and think, what would they be searching? What are their problems? How do they talk about it? And if you've talked with sellers, then you know some of these things. So you go to Google, type in how to sell my house fast, or how to sell a fire damaged house, how to sell a house, can I sell a house during divorce? What are the problems? What are the, like, the life problems that they have that are causing them to go to Google and search? Scroll down to the bottom of the results and look at the People Also Ask section. It's going to have 5 to 10 or whatever of different terms or keywords that people type into Google and start looking at the content that's ranking. Start looking at the websites that are showing up for those questions and just seeing what are they doing? Like, how helpful is this content? And can I do just a little bit better than they are? Can I create content on this? Am I an expert in this? And so that's what I would do is look at the problems people are typing into Google and look at what you're an expert in, what you can actually speak to, and just create content on that. We have a guy, I just talked to them on our podcast last week, Brad Woodall. He's known as the probate guy in his area. He's in Georgia and he's just creating videos consistently on Can I sell a house in probate? How to work with— how to find a probate attorney, things like this. Basically any question remotely related to probate, he's the authority on. So he records little videos on it, puts it into a blog post, uses our video post tool to transcribe it into a post, edits it, and then bam, he's got content answering all these different specific nuanced questions that people have when they inherit a house or they're selling a house in probate. So. Yeah, just, you, you just gotta go down the rabbit hole a little bit and see what kind of content is out there to give you an idea of what is it gonna take to rank for some of those things.

Yeah. And that's just so educational. Is there any data on like how many posts people read or before they like do that, fill the form in or how far, like how much they're consuming?

I don't, I can tell you that I had our, I had one of our guys on our team post that the other day. I said, I wanted to know if people using blogs within Karat were generating more leads. And I think it was, it was basically, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to totally mess up this stat. It was like, I don't want to misquote the number, so I won't say it, but there was a significant difference in lead generation between the members that were posting blogs versus those who were not. So basically those people with, that were launching blog posts on their website were generating more leads. Not because, and not even necessarily because the blog was showing up in Google search, but because people were landing on their website, seeing the blog, seeing the different posts, getting answers to their questions, and then opting in as a result of that. Because like we were talking about, they're educated, they're predisposed to work with you. So some of the blog posts that people are, are launching are ranking, but that's not even always the goal. Sometimes the goal is just let's answer all the questions they have on the website and educate them. Because it's the right thing to do and it's helpful. And then as a result of that, they end up opting in and becoming a lead. But I wish I had that statistic in front of me, but it was significant. They're generating more leads when they're using blog posts the right way.

That's interesting. And we just compared that to a brochure site that's just has the generic copy. You're going to be off that page in a hot second. There's a stickiness to that, that, and it's value-driven, which it's like educating people, right? But there's a lot and it's. A big decision. So I think that's just, that's why I love Kara, cuz it really gets leads. Just for case studies, like I've gotten my best flips off of there. I've gotten owner carry deals, hired landlords, and I've gone to the meetings and it's just been very, very, I don't wanna say smooth or not. It's just, it's, it's a conversation. I'm there to help and it's much different than me just like door knocking and harassing people, that the experience of making a house call from a Curate lead versus other ways. If anyone hasn't experienced an inbound lead, it's, it's magical.

Yeah, it's crazy. We ran a survey a while back. We're actually due to run it again, but we ran a survey to over, I think it was like 120-some of our members, and we asked them like, what's your deal profit on Curate leads versus non-Curate leads? And so carrot lead, meaning they passed through the website at some point. So it could even be a direct mail lead that opted into the website, whatever. But it wasn't like an RVM or cold call lead. We said, what's your profitability and what's your deal flow like on carrot leads versus non? And what we found over those hundreds of members was that there was over 7, they were 7 times more likely to close into a deal, or they were turning into deals at a 7 times higher rate than the non-carrot leads. Because a lot of that is when you're talking about leads with SEO, you don't need a really high volume. If you're closing 1 in 10, 1 in 12 or 15 leads to a deal, that's enough. Imagine even just a couple deals a year. That'll pay for your website for eons. A couple deals a year. But we have a lot of members consistently closing between 8 to 15 leads, 8 to 15 leads to a deal. It's crazy. Even Keith, you mentioned him earlier. I just talked to him last week. He's closing. He's about 1 in 15 for inbound leads versus a lot of other people have like cold call leads. You're maybe what, 50 leads? Depends. But so anyways, we found that they're closing, they're turning into deals at a much higher rate. And then we found that there were about 2.5 times more profit per deal on average. It was almost an extra $14,000. Per deal, just because it's such a much more motivated lead and they're ready to go. You didn't step into the world, into their world. They stepped into yours because it was an inbound lead in most cases. So that's some of the, just the data to really back up. Yeah, these are motivated leads.

And they're motivated, but they're motivated to reach out and get help. They're not, I think sometimes we look on paper and see these distress lists and they look like they're motivated, but we don't really know if they are. And they're being harassed by so many different people and it's just, And the other thing I wanna underscore that you made me think of is like, when you think about cold calling, even if you have a VA, right, there's no return, there's no return and then get to get a lead. But if you're putting out content, that's evergreen, that's gonna be valuable indefinitely. And that's the other thing I love about the strategy is return on your time.

We had a guy, we had a guy in our Facebook group. I, every week I go into our Facebook group and I'm like, hey, who's got wins? Who's closing deals? I'm sure you probably do something similar. A guy came in and said, yeah, I just closed a deal last week. It was from a blog post. Post I wrote a few years ago. It, it never really ranked, but people read it, but it never really ranked. So I hadn't really gotten a lot of leads from it. And Google did an update. And for some reason, Google saw it as more valuable. It came up in the rankings. And he said, I closed a deal from it, or I got a lead from it, follow up a few weeks later. It was last week. He closed a deal and netted him like $49,000 off a blog post he wrote years ago on how to sell a hoarder house. So it was, I can't remember the city, the market that he's in, but it was how to sell a hoarder house in Roseburg, Oregon, whatever. And he ranks for that, got the lead, closed the deal, made 50 grand. It's crazy.

Don't you think that maybe with like an hour or two, what's your hourly rate on that?

Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's wild. The ROI on that, thousands of a percent.

But you think about like pulling lists and sending out junkie postcards and they just go into, I get those 'cause I do direct mail, but it's more like letter driven and it's just All that stuff just goes into the trash. There's no residual value. There's no, like, we're planting this seed with it and that's just, I just think it just makes so much more sense. And it's just, yeah, because when you stop the other kind of marketing, then your marketing stops, right?

Yeah. To be honest, I've been working at Care for 6 years and like, get, getting someone to understand that, hey, you need a website up online to get, to be credible, to close more deals. That's not that hard of a sell. For most people, that makes sense. But I understand that content creation and SEO, like, in order to do the work to get inbound leads, like, we make it a lot easier, but there's still work there. Honestly, it's that whole saying of, what is it, I'm going to botch it, but like, we, we overestimate what we can do in a week or a month and we underestimate what we can do in a year. That's content creation. And I think a lot of times, myself included, sometimes like we just don't have the patience or the discipline to say, nope, I'm going to do work today that's not going to pay off today. That delayed gratification. It's, we already know it works. We see people doing this all the time. Other, your competitors are getting the leads and generating the leads. Are you going to put in the work to do it? Even if it doesn't mean I'm going to close a deal today. And that's the appeal of cold calling. It's okay. I'm going to, I'm going to land one. I'm going to do the slots and I'm going to, one of them is going to say yes. And I'm just gonna grind until someone finally says yes after I've bugged 1,000 people. But you, you can lock up deals that way. It's, I get it. SEO, content marketing, all this stuff. It takes a little bit of work and it doesn't pay off immediately. It takes a few months to get a website to rank in Google. I get that. But it's just a matter of like, how bad do you want it? Is it worth it to you? Are you in this for the long run?

I just thought of being like, I'm big on buy and hold investing, right? Which is also a very long chill strategy. It's not You do a flip and you get this big pile of cash, but it doesn't keep paying you. So it's the same thing. It's like investing. And I think everyone that's made it is generally a long-term investor and it's a long-term strategy. So you're investing in your marketing, which will pay dividends indefinitely. So yeah, I am—

exactly. Houses are assets. Your website and your content, any content you put out there is a, is an asset too.

Yeah, it really is. And that's a good—

it is.

It's hard though, because you don't like that immediate gratification of getting a lead or But I think also there's the leads are maybe, I don't know data, but maybe less likely to fall through or you've built that rapport and it's going to maybe just, there's just, it's just a more solid lead, I think, than a cold call lead or everyone else is going after the same type of lead.

Yeah. Yeah. We found like in that survey that I was talking about, it was like a 7 times higher lead to deal ratio. The way less touchpoints. When I talked to Keith the other day. I was putting together a case study on like his results with Carrot. He's been with us for years, love him to death. And I was like, why stick around with Carrot? What was it like before Carrot, after Carrot? Before Carrot, before inbound leads, he was around 30 to 35 or more touchpoints to a deal and 6 to 12 months or more for it to close. He said now he's about 15 touchpoints or 15 leads to a deal and half as many touchpoints. And most of his deals are closed up, wrapped, done in under 90 days. So it's not only the leads to a deal, but like you're saying, a lot less touchpoints. They're just easier to work with. They move along faster. So it's, yeah, it's just really interesting. To oversimplify, not all leads are created equal.

Yeah. So true. 100%. Yeah. And there's just something about someone that, that knows you, that trusts you and you've built that. There's still, you have to do the work and they're not, not just magically going to convert, but there's just, And people will Google you, like, and I think if you don't, you're not found, it's— I've had people listen to my podcast, which I was a little like, oh, which version of me are they gonna find? If you're doing direct mail, like they're gonna go Google you. Like, that's the world we live in. And if you don't look like you're a professional or, you know, I just think it's really important.

Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that. Cause that's, you know, I, we went deep down the rabbit hole. People are thinking, oh my gosh, there's so many things I could do online. They're probably already overwhelmed them. So I apologize. But like, to keep it simple, the most important thing, you got to rank for your name and your business name. If I'm Brady Buys Houses in Roseburg, Oregon, I sure as heck better be showing up in Google. My website better be number one when someone Googles Brady Buys Houses or Brady Buys Houses reviews, because that's exactly what people type in. This is not theory. This is just what your sellers are doing. And if they're not finding you, they're likely finding— I talk with Carrot members where they're getting leads from other people's companies. Because their company is similarly named or sometimes the same name, maybe even a different state. And they're generating leads and closing deals from people that were trying to find the competition and they couldn't online. And that just blows my mind.

That, yeah, do not let that happen. And from my understanding, yeah, just Google My Business, setting that up is one of the things you should do to just capture that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Get the Google My Business, make sure it's the same. Yeah, make sure the name is consistent. So it's Brady Buys Houses on Google My Business. And then the website says Brady Buys Houses as well. Not Brady Buys Houses LLC. Don't confuse Google. Make sure it's super consistent, but yeah, do the Google Business Profile and then do your website.