Inbound Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Success with Trevor Mauch of Carrot.com

The thing I love about inbound marketing is you end up getting the best leads, the most qualified, the most motivated. So what does that do? That increases— that improves your lead-to-deal ratio. So with direct mail, it might take you 40 direct mail phone calls or leads to get a deal. With inbound marketing or someone doing a Google search and landing on your website or ChatGPT search, it might be 1 in 5. It might be 1 in 10 to get a deal. You can technically take 10 times fewer phone calls. And do 10 times less work qualifying those leads to get a deal. The next thing that we found, Shona, is in our data that people get a higher profit per deal as well. So on average, our clients were getting about 30 to 40% higher profit per deal with inbound marketing. Once again, because the person's more motivated to sell, if it's a motivated house seller that we're talking about. You're going to use inbound marketing for that foundation.

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. Welcome to the She's Got Assets podcast. I'm super excited about my guest today, Trevor Mock. He's amazing. He is the founder and CEO of Carrot, a 5x Inc. Magazine fastest-growing company. They helped over 6,000 real estate investors and agents stand out, generate highly motivated seller leads through their website tools and training. I'm a huge fan of Trevor and Carrot, gotten the best leads from there. Trevor, I'd love to just have you do a quick intro and thank you so much for taking the time today.

Shona, no, I'm pumped to be on here. I know I've got to know you pretty well this past year and a half, 2 years. And one of the things, guys and gals, as you guys are listening to this, that I absolutely love about Shona is she's tackling a niche within real estate better than anyone I've seen tackle the midterm rental part. But also the really cool thing is she is leveraging our technology to go get off-market leads, which is what we do. But yeah, the cliff notes of it, I run a company called Carrot, like you mentioned. We get the blessing and been able to work with so many of the top real estate investors, several up there in the Portland market as well. And we help them get off-market leads, off-market deals. And we do that through the internet. So where a lot of your best prospects, whether you're looking to acquire the next rental property or you're a wholesaler or you're a flipper or you're a real estate agent, where a lot of the best prospects actually go to first, they go to Google. They do some sort of a Google search. Or now they're going to ChatGPT or Perplexity or somewhere like that to find an answer. They're going to some sort of AI tool. And what we do is we really help you guys get in front of those most motivated prospects wherever they're going on the internet. And one of the cool things, Sean, and we can dive into some detail, His AI has really started to, I wouldn't say take over search yet, but it's starting to become a major part of what's dictating where a house seller or buyer ends up finding their answer. So we can dig into that if you'd like to. It's a cool topic right now.

Yeah, I would love to. I just have to share a quick story about Carrot. So my background is in Marketing, I had a crazy way to see with my husband and I remember it was just way back when I'm like, we gotta start a blog, right? We gotta get content. And it was literally like pulling teeth to know, but it worked, right? We got really big brands coming, coming to us for work. And then I switched to being a real estate investor, did a course and it was like all this very traditional door knocking, cold calling. It just made my skin crawl.

Yep. Yep.

And then I was on a coaching call and I heard Karen and I'm like, what? It's content-based? So it was just like amazing. But just to break down really quickly the difference between— I think as investors, we're often taught to go after this distress sandwich, motivate— people should be motivated if they are or not, that they should sell on paper. But what I love about what you guys do is it's people that are actually motivated. And it's inbound versus outbound. I think people don't necessarily— unless you're in marketing, you may not even know what that means.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's break that apart. So the way that I— so there's a lot of different ways that people will talk about inbound marketing or outbound marketing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of define it the way that I look at it. So inbound marketing for me is when you're doing some form of marketing that puts your message in the flow of where people are already going. Right? They're going to find an answer. They're actively seeking out an answer and then they find you in doing that. Google is such an amazing way of doing that. Google search, or like I said, any of the AI searches, but there's also a lot of other types of marketing, but let's say direct mail or cold calling. Those are all what I would consider outbound. Some people will consider direct mail inbound, but in my eyes, Anytime you are putting a message in front of people who aren't actively seeking that message out, and then you're eliciting to try to get a reply, that to me is outbound marketing. I'm going out there to try to get someone's attention and to try to get them to reply. Inbound is the opposite. They, you already have their attention is already there. They already know they have a problem. They already know that they need to sell a house, or they already know that they need to do whatever it is that they're looking to do. They're actively saying, I want to go find a solution for this thing right now. And they're going to Google. And it's so amazing that there's amazing things with inbound marketing versus outbound and vice versa. I think they both play their role. So outbound marketing, Shona, where I see outbound marketing, like I said, direct mail or driving for dollars or cold calling or any of those types of marketing, those are really good to get quick results. So if you want to go get some leads in the next 3 weeks, outbound marketing is probably going to be your spot. If you want to scale, so the companies that actually scale in big ways, they scale with outbound marketing. They're doing TV ads, they're doing direct mail, things like that. Okay. But what I, the thing I love about inbound marketing is you end up getting the best leads, the most qualified, the most motivated. So what does that do? That increases, that improves your lead-to-deal ratio. So with direct mail, it might take you 40 direct mail phone calls or leads to get a deal with inbound marketing or someone doing a Google search and landing on your website or ChatGPT search, it might be 1 in 5, it might be 1 in 10 to get a deal. So you can technically take 10 times fewer phone calls. Excuse me. You can technically take 10 times fewer phone calls and do 10 times less work qualifying those leads to get a deal. The next thing that we found, Shona, is in our data, that people get a higher profit per deal as well. So on average, our clients were getting about 30 to 40% higher profit per deal with inbound marketing. Once again, because the person's more motivated to sell, if it's a motivated house seller that we're talking about. You're going to use inbound marketing for that foundation. Okay. Consistent, predictable, highly motivated, fewer leads to a deal, higher profit per deal. That's where I want to run my business on. Then I want to get quick results and then scale with outbound.

That makes sense. And it's just such a different experience when you also, when you get an inbound lead and you really can help someone versus you're not convincing them to sell, they're actually ready and motivated. Yeah.

It's almost people will talk about sales where a prospect is on their heels or leaning in and engaging in you. I think oftentimes outbound marketing, when people come in, they're on their heels a bit because they're going, okay, you put this message in front of me. It's a little bit of skepticism. Now let me come in, but I'm gonna come in lightly. With inbound, they are reaching out to you saying, I want to talk with you. They found you, they researched you. And that's the beautiful thing. If you have your website set up the right way, which we can dive into some of the principles and what people should do. If you have your website set up the right way, it actually pre-sells them before they ever even call you or submit their information on the phone. And so that, that's the key is getting the website set up the right way, structured the right way, the right content, the right credibility, which we can break down in here. And it does half the selling job for you, which is really cool.

Yeah, I love that because I think these days, especially with AI, we can throw up A brochure site. That's like the term we used to call it. And that doesn't, I think it's useless, frankly, because it's not optimized. And that's what you guys do so well is you understand that, even studying it.

Yeah. The brochure site that, that kind of marked what websites were, I would say the first decade of websites, 2000 through 2012 or so. The whole call for people was just get online. That's where you saw. Your GoDaddies pop up and your Wix and Weebly and Squarespace and all of those local website developers, they all popped up in that decade because it was hard to get online at the start. But then once it became really easy for everybody to get online, just getting online wasn't enough. Just throwing up a Wix site that looked decent to you and looked like one of your competitors isn't enough. And today people will look at it and go, shoot, I can go to an AI tool and just ask it to go copy something. The problem with an AI tool is number one, it's not going to be niche specific. So it's going to miss some things. It's going to miss some of the things that are very specific to what we know, in this case, a house seller wants to see. Another couple of things is the tech stack behind the scenes. So if you don't know what you're doing, you might get something that visually, aesthetically looks okay on the front end and it has some forms in the right spots and it looks okay. We think, man, we're saving some money doing this. But if the tech stack is going to load the website slow, if it's unstable, those types of things, if you lose just one deal because the website didn't load fast or another tech issue and your average profit per deal is $25,000, that cheap AI website just cost you $25,000. And so that's where we always work with our clients and go, okay, number one, our job is to help you stop losing deals because of underperformance on an underoptimized site. Number two, then. Is let's help you amplify getting more, getting in front of more of those deals.

Yeah. So I love that because I think people don't understand, especially the technical stuff. Like I used to be a web designer and I blew up a few sites with WordPress. Hit the wrong button. Yeah. So what I'd love to talk about, like what makes a good site content authority and all of that stuff. What is Google like? Because a static site doesn't really build that at all in my opinion.

What I'm gonna do actually, Shona, I'm going to, if you're cool, I'm gonna share my screen, but I'll do my best to verbalize it for everyone. Just listen to the audio because there, there is a framework and a structure. So I'm gonna walk through an actual structure of a, and I'll say it's a service business website. Okay. So if you are a service business and you especially work with people who are making kind of bigger transactions, bigger decisions. You're a real estate investor, you're a real estate agent, you're working with a house seller, house buyer, you're a contractor working with a homeowner, you're a roofer, a plumber, electrician, any of those are higher ticket service businesses. This structure that I'm going to walk you through is a really powerful structure. And I'll show you some sites on the screen. I'll show some sites on the screen that, that, that show that example. And now here's the cool thing. Is you can do this on any platform. So you can go build this on WordPress. You can go hack your way through building it on Wix or something like that. What we do is we help make it 80% easier. And then we've got tools built into the backend that help you track your Google rankings, that help you create content, that help you write content, that help you do a bunch of other things to make this all easier. But I'm going to walk through, Shona. A few of the things really quickly here, and I'm going to show this on the screen really quick and I'll verbalize it. This format that I'm going to walk you through is based off of data, millions of leads. It's based off of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of visitors to our websites. And these are mostly house sellers. Okay. So it's not something that we went to Fiverr or whatever, Upwork.com and said, hey guys, can you guys make us a WordPress site? This is based off of millions and millions of data points and hundreds, if not thousands, of tests and innovations that honed into what will work the best to be able to bring a service-based prospect in, build trust, and drive them to want to work with you. Okay. And when we were look— when we look at it, we have this data on our end where we can always pull up the highest converting websites in our system at any given time. So what I'm showing on the screen right here is just a screenshot of during this point in period, I think it was a 90-day period, we pulled up the top 8 best converting sites. And this is, doesn't matter the traffic source, it doesn't matter any of that. And these conversion rates are actually lower than reality because this includes any traffic even that landed just on their contact page or something. This wasn't just a Google pay-per-click campaign to a highly targeted landing page. And so the highest converting sites— now this is not a house seller— is converting 30, 35, 40, 45, in this case 48%. That is a private lending website actually, getting people who want to borrow cash as an investor. That one's crushing it. But our best converting seller websites, where it's a house seller, it's 20, 25, 30, 32, 33%. Which is really high. Okay. And so I'm going to walk you guys through what that structure looks like. And it's based off of looking at tons and tons of variations of websites, short sites, long sites, looking at the different formats and then asking the question with technology and data, what elements do we need to have in the website? Because people are engaging with those elements and it's helping them to build trust. Okay. So I'm actually going to pull up a document, an internal doc that is our internal training document. And I'm going to, let me see if I can find it. I'm going to walk through some of those elements that we're gonna, that we're wanting to have the website built on. Okay, so I'm just gonna pull it up here. There we go. So the first thing that you guys are gonna want to do, there's about 11 different sections if you're really wanting to optimize it. Okay, now you do, you have to have all these sections to make a website perform? No. Okay. What I'm talking about is if you really want to hyper-optimize it, these are the 11 sections and the order ideally. You can shuffle them a bit. I wouldn't get too worried if your how it works or process section is, is 2 steps below this other one. I wouldn't get too worried about that, but these are structured in an order that unfolds in the order that someone would make a decision and that someone would want the information. And so that's a principle to lock in is when you're building a website, we have to remember the website's not built for you. It's not built for your cousin who's a web designer and you send it to your cousin and say, hey, do you like this, this website? It's built for the prospect. That's the only person it's built for. And we have to be thinking, what is that prospect thinking about? What's going through their mind? What problems do they have? What are they weighing? What are those stressors? What desires do they have? And we need to join that conversation in their mind and address it as we go. And I'll actually show your website, 'cause I think your website does a really good job of most these elements. Okay. The very first thing is a hero section. Okay. So a hero section, it is that section at the top. I'm just gonna go do this. Shona, let's pull up your website. 'Cause I think such a good example in so many ways. The hero section is this first thing at the top that really needs to bring people in and give them a very clear call to action. Okay. So just like Shona's here, I'm gonna verbalize it through it. She's in the Portland market. So you need to talk about what market you're in. You need to talk about what you do. Like what problem do you solve immediately, right? When people come in there, what do I do and where am I at? Because people need to discover within 3 seconds, do they have something that can solve my problem? I think where a lot go wrong is we cram way too much copy and content sometimes in the top, and it makes people read a bunch. They need to understand clearly within 3 seconds whether you're, whether you can solve their problem. Okay. And this one does it really fast. If I'm in Portland and I need to sell my house, I want a cash offer, 3 seconds. I know right there. I, I, I'm, there's a service that can help me. Okay. And that's what the hero section does. So one upgrade that I might add to your hero section here, I would thing is maybe put a little bit of credibility right below that form or even up here into the above the form. I'm going to show one that is a, another site actually in your market. I was just looking at sites today and wasn't in, yeah, it wasn't in preparation at all for this call, but this one here, I went to Perplexity today. And I was creating a video and I literally went to Google and typed, help me find the best cash home buyer in my area of Portland, Oregon to sell my house to. I want to sell it for cash without a real estate agent. Okay. And this is happening in ChatGPT and Perplexity every day. We get those leads coming into our client sites every day. And there's a handful of options. There's a handful of carrot sites up there. And the first one that pulled up was Better Off Home Buyers. I didn't know that was a carrot site when I first saw that name, clicked it. And this is what it showed. So here's a couple things that I, I would adjust. One of the reasons this is showing up high in AI search is because it does have credibility and some more specific things about their business, how long they've been in business, things like that up at the top of the site. Okay. So that's one thing to adjust on yours, but yours is really good. I would just maybe put something that says get a cash offer from a trusted home buyer. Maybe put in there how long you've been buying. Maybe put in there if there's a different element that you're, that you're really good at, that you're a specialist in a type of house or an area of the, of Portland. Put some more specifics up there and something that's credibility up there. He's got his Better Business Bureau, or he's got his Google Reviews badge, and that's going to be a good upgrade. Okay. So that's the first thing is the hero section. If I were to look, if I were to tell people, What is the thing that's gonna make 80% of the impact on your website as far as conversion goes? It's that. It's the hero section. I don't care how good everything else is below this section. If you do not have a hero section like I talked through and showed where it's got some quick basic copy, it's, it says what you do, where you are, maybe a little line qualifying one of your unique value propositions with a really clear, easy form and a big old button. If you don't have that at the top, you're probably losing 50% of your leads, no matter how good your content is below it. Okay. That's step 1. And I'm not going to go through every one of these 11. But then the next thing in the website is we need to start to build trust and interest with them. We need to say, hey, what is it that you're probably— here's the problem you're probably going through and we can help you through that thing. And so you can address that by saying, hey, struggling to sell your house? Let me kind of walk you through what, what the things you might be thinking about and how we can help you. Or you can say just like this site or just like yours, you know, verbalize it. Hey, we buy houses in this area and I can help you sell it for cash and let me bring it up. Hey, are you looking to sell that house? Here's some things about the market and let's view some testimonials. We can help you out. Right? So right out of the gates after the hero, got to once again address We can help you with this particular problem. Let me tell you about it a little bit. And now we're gonna bring you into some credibility. Okay? So you've done a great job here and now we're showing his face. We talked about the problem, the situation, the location. We gave you some basics, a little bit of credibility up top, and now we need to introduce who it is that's gonna serve them. And that's one of the major things I see a lot of people hiding behind is they hide behind their websites. No matter the industry, if you're a plumber or roofer or a real estate investor or an agent. Agents are pretty good putting their faces everywhere, but I would say a lot of people hide behind their websites. And in this day and age, especially the AI age, trust and credibility is key. And people want to know who they work with. So you've done an amazing job there. Make the contact information really easy to get to. Okay. So what are some of the next sections? We talked about trust. We want to add in Google reviews if you got them, add in a picture. Of yourself and/or your team if you have a team. We want to talk about how long you've been in business. If you're licensed, this is a biggie, Shona. If you're licensed as an agent or a contractor, AI, including Google's AI Overviews, is really looking for you to say, I've been, I'm a licensed real estate agent, or I'm a licensed contractor, and give your license number on there. And then even next, link it up to the state real estate commission website with your profile. I know that sounds wild, but AI is looking for those things because it wants to prove that you say who you are. It doesn't just want to believe that you're good at what you do. They want you to show that you're good at what you do and that you're credible. Okay. So what, one of the next things then is no matter the business type is you want to break down your process. Okay. So what is the process on what you do? And you could do it just as simple as what Shona's got on her website. Hey, here's step 1. You're gonna get ahold of us, submit the form or call us. Step 2, get an offer. Step 3, you'll get paid. Let's close. You can do a video walking through the process where you walk through how you do it, whatever you need to do to really bring that transparency. But on all those service businesses websites, we need to walk through the process. Okay. Even showing like a midterm rental website. If it's a tenant, walk through the process and how it works to actually engage in and rent a property from you. Do this and we'll match you to a property. Step 2, this. Step 3, this. And then you move in. Um, so get really clear walking people. You're a plumber, same thing. Step 1, have an intake call with us so we can figure out your situation. Step 2, we'll get it scheduled on the books. Step 3, we're going to show up at your house and get it fixed. Okay. Just make it really easy. And this usually happens within 17 or within 7 days or whatever it's going to be. Okay. So that how it works is really important. And like I said, I'm skipping around here a little bit. Was given some of the main important things. Once we've kind of walked through and shown really quickly the service you offer, the location, you had a really good call to action at the top, a little bit of credibility in there, I've showed that you're working with someone legitimate, and then we walk through how it works. Now we want to give another opportunity for a call to action. Okay. So somewhere mid-page, I really like mid-page about every 500 words or so. To put a call to action in place. Okay. Because if you have a page that's long, you don't want to have the only calls to action be at the top and be at the bottom. Something in the middle. So Shona's website has a really good call to action way at the top. It has a call to action there towards the middle of the content and probably another one. Yep. Right down there. Another call to action, middle of the content. So as you're going and building trust, you always want to go, hey, if you're ready, I've got this next step for you. If you're ready, call us, or if you're ready, submit the form. Don't just require them to get to the bottom of the page. Okay. So that's kind of my rule of thumb is about every 500, maybe even 300 words, put a good call to action, put the form in there, put the phone number in there. Okay. And you always have the form at the bottom of the page as well. Always. The thing that we found, Shona, running lots of data and lots of testing is most of the people will stay at the top of the website. Most will not make it down to the bottom. I would say about 70% will never make it past the hero section and just below. But the cool thing is, who are the 30% that are researching more? It's the ones who are really motivated and actually seeking out a solution and actually like teasing out and trying to figure out a decision here. Right? So that, that even though most people don't get below the hero, The ones who do want more information, they're trying to figure out, do I reach out to Shona or do I not? And there's information that they feel that they need before they can do that. So when I talk with people and they say, man, the website's too long, the content's too long. I just want something that's just a landing page. It's a bunch of white space and hardly any words. Guys, you're not Apple selling an Apple product. Okay. Apple is white space everywhere showing big pictures because that's what the prospect needs. The prospect wants to see giant photos of the technology. The prospect wants to see the specs, lots of white space because Apple is about design. I expect a well-designed Apple product and I expect the website to match that aesthetic. Okay. If you go to Amazon though, those are two of the highest producing websites in the world. As far as revenue goes, Amazon and Apple.com, Amazon looks completely different, right?

Total. Yeah. Aesthetically. Yeah. Extremely opposite.

Yeah. Amazon's cluttered. Like a lot of people would say it's cluttered, but Amazon is optimized for exactly what that prospect is looking to do. Amazon isn't stupid, right? Amazon can build an Apple.com looking website. They don't because their prospect would not buy as many things on that website. They're in a different mindset looking for different things. So we have to think about the same things on our websites and when we're attracting a motivated house seller, in this case, looking for off-market properties, is that person's making a major life decision. Do you think they're gonna make a major life decision to sell a property on a landing page with 500 words? Probably not.

That's true.

Probably want to go in and go, what does this service look like? How does it work? Are they legitimate? I wanna see what I wanna see reviews. I wanna see how their process works. I wanna understand it. I wanna understand a bunch of stuff. And so that's why when we've tested long copy versus short copy, long pages versus short pages, the long pages for this industry work better every single time because you need the information at the right time to build trust, build credibility, and move them down that path. Okay. I'll go over one, one or two last little things. I'll toss back over to you, Shona, is another thing that is important for a real estate investor who's looking to get off-market properties is to make sure that you have clarity, you create clarity for your website prospect and where you do business. Okay. Or if you're a plumber or an electrician, if you do business in 3 different cities, great. You should talk about where you do business somewhere on that website and you should have a page set up for every single location or every single city you do business in. If you're an investor up in the Portland area, as an example, I'm probably gonna want to create a page for Portland and a different one for Vancouver, Washington, and a different one for Gresham and a different one for Hillsborough and different one for Beaverton and different one for Salem if I buy there. Just like Zillow creates different pages for every location of homes for sale, you're gonna do the same thing on your own website. And so somewhere on that page, if you are in multiple locations, if you're in multiple cities or states, You're going to want to have a service area section. Hey, we buy in these areas, we buy in these parts of town, or we buy in these parts of the state. Shona's got hers right here with all of the location pages for the different areas that she has pages for. And so that's going to be further down the page. That's not the first thing we should put up there. That's towards the bottom if they're just seeking out more information. Okay. Last one that I'll talk about here, Shona, and then we'll, we'll move over to where you want to go. Is that, I guess, two more service situations. What types of situations do I buy houses in? And I'm looking for yours here. So you want to list all the situations that you solve that problem for. So if you're a plumber or an HVAC, once again, I'm going to list all the different plumbing situations or HVAC situations, or if I'm a real estate investor buying off market, I want to list all the situations that I might encounter that I can solve that a seller's going through. And like on your site, Shona, hey, you avoiding foreclosure? Great. We can help you. Going through a divorce? Great. We can help you if you need to sell that property. Too many repairs and you can't, you can't? Great. I can help you. You're tired of tenants and your landlord? I can take that off your hands. Right? You just inherited a house? Great. I got you. You're relocating to a different town and you don't want to list it, you can't sell it? Hey, reach out to me. I can help you. So we gotta let people know the situations that we can help. Okay. The last one is FAQ, and that's an area that, that would be a good upgrade on your site, and that will help you on the AI search. And that's one, Shona, if you're game, and we could literally change right now.

Yeah. Oh, 100%. Let's do it.

Let's go to your homepage, and you might want to update a little bit of the copy just so it's not the exact same copy as what I drag over here. But let's go find your homepage. And so what I'm doing, y'all. Is I'm logging in to Shona's Carrot account, and I'm going to go find her homepage here, and we're just going to drag over an FAQ section. Okay, an FAQ section. I probably missed it. Where is it? Da da da da da. There it is. Cool. So we're going to go to the homepage, and we're just going to go to our pattern builder. We're going to drag over an FAQ section. So FAQs are really important right now. For many reasons. Number one, FAQs do help increase conversion rate. I'll find myself on Amazon, if I'm buying a product, every single time I'm either going to go to FAQs or reviews. If I wonder, does this product do this? I look at the FAQs a lot, right? If I'm searching for, looking at a product online to buy, I always look at the FAQs. Number 2 though, AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, they really look at FAQs majorly. So they'll literally pull your answers from your FAQs into their answers and then cite you as the source and give you a link. So what we're going to do is that as towards the bottom, let's say maybe right here, I guess there are some FAQs there. So you've got some here. I missed it when I was going through it. I would probably add 3 or 4 more. And, uh, so you, you do have some in here. So I would probably add 3 or 4 more in there. Expand it a bit. Someone was using the Karat platform and wanted to add an FAQ. They could just go, just click wherever they want to add that bad boy. And I'm going to go up to browse all, go to patterns. And we have a, we have our new site builder for anyone's wanting to build one from scratch, but I'm going to go, I think it's under content. Probably we organize better the stuff on the new site design platform, but just like that, we added an FAQ and I can add a title above it, but right here, then I can go in and edit this, or I could even just use the AI tool to have it rewrite that content for me. So it's going to rewrite the selection. Use the AI, it's going to read the rest of your page to give it context for how it's going to write. And then it's going to go plunk it in right there. Okay. So I'm going to remove this since you already have an FAQ section, but I would highly suggest everyone put an FAQ section and I usually want to see somewhere showing up between 6 and 8 FAQs.

Okay.

And if anyone's wondering, what do I put in an FAQ? Literally go to GPT and just type, here's my URL, my website, here's the type of business. I'm in this area. Can you give me 5 or 6, give me 7 good solid FAQs that, that frequently asked questions with answers that Motivated House Seller might type in, and it'll give you a really good copy. Okay. So that, that, that kind of rounds it out. I'll blow through it again, but number 1, guys, get a really strong hero section at the top of the website. Okay. Something that is easy for them to understand. They opt in. Number 2, bring them in, introduce them, say, hey, here's a problem I can solve for you. And here's how I've done it before. Bring in some credibility, then introduce them to yourselves so people get to know you. Have calls to action throughout the page. Then walk through the steps. Here's the steps, right? And then he's got some more. Talk about the situations you help people in. Give some reviews, some more credibility. And then you want to say where you do business in. And then ideally you've got an FAQ at the bottom. I don't know if he has an FAQ. It looks like, yeah, he does right there. Ideally a big robust FAQ at the bottom with a form. So the cool thing is, Shawna, the format you've got, you're 90, 93% of the way there. I would add a few FAQs, add a little bit more credibility in the hero. Talk a little bit more about your experience, put in, I've been doing this since this year. If you're a licensed agent, put in the license number, put in real-world credibility and testimonials, and that starts to boost things up in the AI search engines a lot more.

Hey there, savvy investor. Quick question. Are you ready to jump into midterm rentals but not sure where to start? Well, I've got you covered. And she's got assets. We help real estate investors set up and fully book their first midterm rental. With quality guests, you can double or even triple your cash flow. And here's the kicker: we dive deep into marketing strategies, including how to tap into the lucrative niche of getting insurance leads for displaced families or long-term stays that can really boost your bottom line without all the hassle and regulations of short-term rentals. Sound interesting? Head over to she's got assets.com/ntr and get all the details. And if you're new to real estate investing, we've got something just for you. Check out our REI Playbook course where we teach you how to snag your first investment property by finding off-market deals without cold calling or door knocking. We'll even walk you through creative deal structures like owner financing and how to leverage what you've already got. You can find all that goodness at she's got assets.com/REI. Oh, and one more thing, don't miss out on joining our free She's Got Assets community. We've got a ton tons of resources plus weekly live streams where you can dive deep into strategies to help you succeed. You don't want to miss it. Trust me. Hop into the community at she'sgotassets.com/network and let's get you crushing those real estate goals. All right. Back to the show. Thank you. That was, that was such a great overview. And just for anyone watching, I think we forget this is people's biggest transaction and there's a lot of fear and overwhelm. How does that work? And the more we can educate people, I think the more value we provide, and that just inherently builds that trust.

Yeah.

Because it's a very big decision and it's pretty scary for people.

You used the right word, Shana, educate, because I think a lot of people, they try to market to the prospect, they try to sell the prospect, and the best way to sell is to educate, right? The best way to sell is to educate. I was working with my marketing team. This last couple of weeks, I think there was too many things we were doing that were marketing to people. We were talking to people instead of having a conversation with them to figure out their problem, speak to the problem, educate on how to solve it, show that we've solved it. And then from there, logically, what is their next thing? They're going to say, can you help me with this thing? It sounds like you know about this, right? If we sell, they're going to ask you Great. What, how can you help me with this? If we start selling and we're immediately diving in, hey, I can make you a cash offer. Let's dive into this. Duh. People start to get back on their heels because they're being sold. People like to buy, but they don't like to be sold. And so step into education, asking, figuring out their problems, speaking their problems back to them shows that you understand, show who you are, that you're a genuine person. Educate and explain how they can solve that problem. Show some examples where you solved it for people like them. And then just say, great, now that you know these things, what would, you know, what's the next step? Where would you like to go from here? And just see what people say.

It's really the, you're driving with value versus the like, and that's what I don't like. Just, I have to say, that's what I don't like about outbound because we're looking at a list of a distressed seller and it's just, you should sell at a very lowball offer because you're distressed. And it's just, it's coming from a different place to me. And that's why I resonate so much with Carrot strategy and the education and the content forward. To me, that's why I love it. So everyone needs to use Carrot because I just don't, don't bother unless you are, you want to pay someone to keep your site up. It's a lot of work. And again, someone can copy it, but the backend is what's really powerful.

Yeah.

Because yeah, technology is great, but it, I'm always telling my kids, it's not magic, you guys. Yeah.

And there's a couple of things, Sheila, like you mentioned, we can go out there and emulate and copy, copy something on the face, but the real power comes in the innovation in even right now with AI search, what you copy today, might be what works today, but as AI search is moving really fast, that might not be what is working as well in 6 months or 12 months. Maybe there's some tweaks to it. And that's one of the things that we try to do at Carrot is keep people ahead of the game, keep people up there with the technology changes. And I know you were in the last AI search that we did. We're doing one here. We're probably going to do them every month until people have got it. And it's like everyone caught up on it, but, but with AI search side of things, you can leverage technology like ChatGPT and have really good prompting that helps you analyze your website and optimize it. And those are things shown in 2026 we're going to be building into our software. So you just log in and it analyzes that page for you and it says, hey, these are the 3 things I'd suggest you go change. And one of the, one of the biggest things I would suggest that people do, if you are a Carrot member, We're going to be guiding you guys through this, but there's a box inside of Carrot that is in like the settings area and it says business description. It's a newer box this last 6 months. And we guide you through how to make a really good thorough business description. We're going to be working with you guys to make really robust detailed business descriptions that our tool ingests because then that helps us to guide the strategy in your copy, in your marketing, on the page as we build those features. Also though, the AI content write tool that's in there, it, if you build out a robust business description that says everything about your business, what you do and your services and all this stuff, that AI tool, that AI content writer refers to that description and it customizes all of your content to be much more specific to you, which is pretty cool. So guys, leverage AI. It does help when you use it the right way.

And I love AI, but I also think the strategic piece, because like you have to be really the prompting and the filtering of the right way. And that's, you guys are masters of that. And I think that if you don't do that right, it's not that useful. You really have to have the human element. That strategic element is, you can often just think, oh, it's this magical thing, but you have to be, I just think that the, we don't always, we forget that, I think.

You gotta train it, right? You gotta train it. One, one tool that, that I was literally tweaking this morning, you've got access to it, is the On Page Optimizer. And so I'm, I'm, we're going to be making it even better. I want to share the screen really quick.

This is going to take a few minutes.

And so there's this site up in Washington that I was running some tests on. And the site's pretty decent overall. It's a real estate agent and an investor, and they're attracting off-market properties, discount off-market properties now through Carrot. And the site looks solid. Our team built it. It looks solid. I would give it a solid 85, 80, 85 score on this. The challenge is there are some elements that even after we had built it, I look at it and went, oh, this, some of this stuff is so new. That even on some of those services, oh shoot, we need to get caught up there. So I took this, I fed it into the On Page Optimizer, which if you guys want this tool and all of our other AI tools related to helping you get mentioned in AI search, I'm going to give Shona a link to our next challenge. Put, uh, we'll give you the link, Shona, put it in the show notes. And we do these challenges each month, AI Search Challenge, like $27 to join, or you can, it's $99 for VIP. Make sure you look in the show notes to get that link from Shona to go join our next one. It's 3 days, 2 hours a day for each one of the days. We work with you to execute. The 4th day is a VIP day for that. It's for $100, but you're going to get these tools. So I submitted this in and this is even on a site that is already, like I said, pretty darn well optimized versus the average, but it's not quite there. And gives a review of it. It pulls the content, it recognizes the industry, it recognizes the prospect it should be working with. It gives an audit across all those elements I just walked you through, and then it gives the top 3 recommendations. So the way that this particular tool works is we didn't want to overwhelm people with 19 things to go fix. We just say at any given time, we want it to bring up the top 3 prioritized in the most impact. And so if you go fix these, it's going to bring up the next top 3 on the next audit. So the first thing is schema. Now this is technical stuff. So most people watching this probably go, I don't know what schema is. I don't care. You don't have to care too much. We help make that easier. And we're going to be automating schema in 2026. We're not there yet, but we're getting there. That's the first thing. So we have a schema generator, which is basically it creates this fancy code. That talks to Google and talks to ChatGPT and Perplexity, and it makes the page make more sense for them. So it can then more effectively tell the world about your website. It really does help. Okay. So we have a tool that you're going to get in that challenge that Shona's got the link for. But the biggest thing, Shona, that I find on most sites and similar on yours is increasing the proof and trust signals. Yours is better than this site for sure. But then it gives some specific things that person can now go do. Okay. So if you guys want to be able to optimize those pages, show up to that search challenge, I'll give Shona the link. We're going to give you all these tools, help you optimize it in those 3 days and get a big jumpstart on it.

Hey, what's up? I think you said this in the training, we're at the forefront of this. So if you do this, you're— it's like when blogging with He got ahead of that, right? This is, I feel like there's this window right now that it can, don't be intimidated. You can ask, it's the beauty of AI is you can ask it like, what do you mean? And it'll just tell you like, you don't even have to— what you're doing, right? Or consult with experts, but it's really powerful. So what high level, I feel like there's a big threat of credibility and in this day and age of everything, there's so much like content. What is the best way to I think Google My Business is really underutilized. I think most people don't know that. So if you can speak to how— I know you're doing that thing, but like, high level, what's the best way to get—

Yeah, 100%. So the website still is the core kind of home base for a business. Google, ChatGPT, they're all still treating the website as the home. So the first thing is getting the website nailed, using that structure that we walk through. And in, in that structure, we've set it up for what Google calls EAT: experience, expertise, authority, and trust. That's something that they rolled out years ago that they say, hey, now we're optimizing more for this and less for these other things we used to optimize for. And that thing that they're optimizing more for is EAT. They want people to see, or they want businesses to show that they're an expert in the thing. So that means you gotta have content, gotta have content on the website, text and video and in pictures, and showing that you have a knowledge around that topic. The next thing is experience. Uh, and this goes to the Google Business Profile too, but experience. Show that you've been doing it for a while or however long you've been doing it. And literally say it. Say, I've been doing this for 15 years, or we've been doing this since 1995, or We've helped 300 local whatevers do whatever, right? What, whatever it is. And show a bunch of reviews that shows experience. Another thing with experience, they want you to actually show before and afters, like show real pictures, not stock photos, or not even before and afters. Show a photo of an actual client or an actual property and go, hey, we bought this property on Oak Street in Portland, uh, from John. And John inherited the house. Click this to go see John's full case study. So that's experience, not just telling people that you do what you do, but showing them that I've done it and go look, like there's some real examples here. So then there's authority, which authority is that other people also say that you're experienced and you're an expert in that thing. So that's where Google Business Profile comes in, is we definitely want to grow our reviews. So that, that's where I would probably be driving the majority of my reviews. For my business and really build in a review machine. It, we have a bonus in that challenge where everyone gets VIP, I think, is gets the customer review machine. But you want to be able to turn as many of your clients into a review on Google Business because that helps you shape your overall credibility profile in Google and ChatGPT's eyes. And the last one, which is trust, it's similar, but we should be bringing reviews in, credibility testimonials in. You should be putting your location. It should be easy to contact you. At the bottom of your website, you should have your full address and company name and phone number at the bottom of your website. It should be insanely easy to contact you. Trusted companies can be contacted easily. Companies that can't be contacted easily likely shouldn't be trusted as easily, right? So that's the first thing on the website, but then on Google Business Profile, it all does the same, the same thing, but you build out that content there and Everywhere that Google Business Profile allows you to add content. Because if they're saying, hey, you should, here's a box to fill out, you should probably fill it out because they're literally saying, we want to know this information because it's going to help you, it's going to help us learn about your business. So fill out everything. A couple things on Google Business Profile, if I were to give like a couple of the biggest mistakes, Shona, right now, let's say 6, 7 years ago, people would optimize their Google Business Profile for a keyword. Sell My House Fast Tacoma is literally the name of their Google Business Profile, as if that's their company name. Unless, because they were trying to optimize it for search, right? Unless that's actually your company name, and that's actually the company name on your website, and it's actually the same company name on all the other places that your business is mentioned or listed on the internet. Don't do that anymore. That, that is not where the future is going. That stuff is getting adjusted in Google Business. Okay. So you want to put your actual business name. What is the business name that is your company name that's used on your website? That's used elsewhere. It's on your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn profile. It should be the exact same business name, letter for letter on that Google Business Profile. Okay. Phone number should be the exact same phone number. Google Business Profile phone number should be the same as the website. It should be the same as your LinkedIn or your Facebook should all be the same. Business profile information. Okay. So that's the first thing you've got to match it all up. That's the biggest first mistake. Second mistake is, is people don't choose enough categories. So you have a chance to choose like a business category. And usually ours is going to be something like local business or real estate consultant or something, because there isn't one for house flipper as a primary category. But real estate consultant or property manager, if you're a property manager, there is a primary one for property manager. Choose that one as your primary, but always choose a secondary because the more we add on, the more reach it gives our Google Business Profile. So there is a secondary that is related to cash home buyers and stuff like that, or whatever yours is. So always choose a primary or secondary location and, uh, or a service or a category. And then I would add up to 20 or so services. And so a lot of people literally just add one. They go, we're an HVAC repair or we buy houses. Add 20. And same thing, you can use one of our tools that helps you do this, or just go to GPT and explain what you're doing and say, hey, here's my Google Business Profile. Can you come up with 15 to 20 services that I should add to this? Because as you add those services, that helps broaden out your reach in your, your business profile, and you're going to get shown in more places. If you drive reviews, match up your name, address, phone number across your website and social profiles and Google Business, you do a primary, secondary category and 15 to 20 services. If all you do is that, you're going to be ahead of 80 to 90% of all people on Google Business. Then that last bit of optimization is actually filling everything else out.

When— since it's free, there's— and that's the thing, it's free and it's just, It's, yeah, it's, yeah, I think it was really—

it's crazy. I was looking at one of our biggest, one of our biggest clients' sites this morning, Shona, and they do 500 deals a year in a few different states. And I was looking at their lead sources. It is bonkers because they've really optimized their Google Business Profiles in every city. It's bonkers how many are coming through as a Google Business Profile referred lead. I would say solid quarter of their leads. For a company that does 500 deals, a quarter Google Business Profile.

That, and I mean that, yeah, it's like everyone go set it up. You, I might even recommend it for like, yeah, mid-term rentals, right? For if you're whatever, any business you have needs to be optimized. It's free.

Like you said, it's free. It takes you, it takes you an hour or two maybe to optimize it. And then 10 minutes a month, it's half an hour a month. It could be, if you got one deal off of that thing and you acquired an off-market property at a 30% discount, it was worth that 4 or 5 hours for that year.

100%. Yeah. I get all my, like, from my direct bookings from midterm rentals, I get reviews on there. I just, I'm, it's, yes, you, it's like a must-do. Trevor, this has been so helpful. I know we're coming up to time. Just a couple, one quick wrap-up question if you have time.

Sure.

I know this, you have a whole nother side of you about being an entrepreneur and building a business that serves you. So I always like to ask the top business or life advice you would give someone to live life on their own terms.

Heck yeah. Yeah. I think the biggest thing, Shonan, and you worked with me long enough, is I think we have— I'm gonna specify this for entrepreneurs specifically. There's probably 100 pieces of advice I could give, but this is if you're an entrepreneur, advice on how to actually be a better entrepreneur and make sure that business serves you. So we have to understand what we're hiring this business to do for us. And we hire people and software and consultants to, to do things for our businesses. And if those things don't do the job, what do we do? We change them, right? We adjust the person or coach them or do a new tool. But all too often we hire these businesses to go do something without being clear what it is we're asking that business to do. And then we end up getting hired by the business. We end up getting hired by the business. It overwhelms us. It drains us. We start doing work that drains our energy. We start to despise the business because now we work for this thing. It doesn't work for us. And so there's 3 things, Shona, that I've come to over the years that a business should do for us. And as long as we focus on these 3 things, it puts us in the right mindset. Number 1, a business should give us work that interests and energizes us most of the time. Now you're not going to always have work give you energy every single second, but if most of our work is draining our energy, we're doing something wrong. We, I've got a process called the energy audit. People can just grab it for free. careert.com/energy, just go grab it. There's a video I walk through how to use it. And if you just do that 15 minutes a quarter, it's going to help you get more of your work to give you energy. The second thing a business should do for you should fund your vision. Meaning you should have some idea of what kind of life you want and how much that might cost you. Because I see people building businesses way too big and same thing, getting gobbled up by their business that their vision actually needs an income half that big. And they just are probably growing it for ego or for fear. And so right-size the business to fund the vision that you got. And then number 3, our business should give us, give us impact that we're proud of. That we get to show up every day going, I'm not just doing this to put food on the table. I'm not just doing this to, to get a paycheck, but I, I'm interested in it. Yes, it does fund the life that I want to have, including my philanthropy or whatever else. But you know what? I enjoy that I get to impact people's lives and whatever that impact is for you, doesn't matter. Just it, whether emotionally, if it emotionally pulls you forward in your business to excite you. To get up and do what you're about to do, 'cause you're emotionally tied to this impact, that is the right impact for you. So give you work that interests and energizes you. Number 2, fund the vision. Number 3, an impact that you're proud of. Just recognize that business is a tool to do those things. You are not the tool for the business.

That's such great advice. I think it's being really intentional, right? 'Cause I think we get caught up in things and we get overwhelmed. Especially in this age of, there's just a lot of shiny objects.

Yeah. So always pull back and ask if you're taking on a new opportunity or you feel you're wore out, pull back and say, okay, what did I hire the business to do for me? Is it doing it? And what needs to change? And then go take the right steps or get around the right people to make those changes. But it's hard, right? You and I have worked together and I've gone through challenges myself where you just hold on to certain things because of fear of change. We hold on to certain things because of being unsure whether that things are gonna work, which is another thing of fear. Again, we hold onto that cuz of identity. Shoot, this is what I have been, this is what people know me as, but what happens if I go do this instead? What are they gonna think about me? We've gotta let all that go. It's hard. I'm not gonna say it's not hard, but that's the beauty the business gives us is business is the best personal growth tool I've ever experienced because in order for a business to grow, You first have to grow. Your business will never outgrow your identity. And that's the great opportunity that we have as business owners.

I think that point right there is so— it is, in mindset, is so critical in just any business, but especially I feel like we do big deals, right? We deal with what, you know, it's not easy. And I think that's so important. You have to— I don't think that's talked about enough in real estate.

Yeah, for sure.

Trevor, thank you so much. Any— so for anyone, Carrot is amazing. He has the— and also just the culture at Carrot too. I feel like you really live your values and your purpose, and that really stands out. And I think that's so important, even when you're deciding on software or whatnot, and it's very effective too. But I just wanted to say that because Means a lot to me. So if anyone signed up for Karat, anything else you'd add? I know you've got some workshops coming up. Put that on there.

Yeah. Yeah. karat.com is kind of where to find us or grab a link from Shona. Yeah. We have our challenge, our AI search challenge that we're running every month until people don't need it anymore. We'll give the link to the referral link over to you, Shona, so people can check out in the show notes. And then if that entrepreneur side of things is We do have a podcast called The Evergreen Marketing Show where we talk about these things in a lot of detail. So go check that out. But if the entrepreneur side of things, if what we just talked about in the last 5 minutes interests you, that's where I have a podcast called The Entrepreneur Freedom Formula. So just go look it up, Entrepreneur Freedom Formula, my name, Trevor Mach, M-A-U-C-H, nothing to buy over there. Just all information. Go check it out on YouTube or wherever you listen to a podcast and I'd be overjoyed if it added value for you.

Amazing. Yeah. You're a wealth of knowledge and yeah. Trevor, thank you so much.