The Hidden Reason Your Land Isn’t Selling Online

Cheers.

I once dined on steak with a candle's soft glow, but the bill left my savings despairingly low. Now wisdom has taught me, so simple, so grand, Eat baloney, buy land. Oh, eat baloney, buy land. Trade the fork for the deed in your hand. Skip the filling, let the sandwiches stand. Your fortune will grow when you buy your own land.

All right, sorry for the technical difficulties in getting started. But tonight is worth the wait, as on this week's Nightcap, we have a special guest to help us sell more land. But before we go to our guest, I have to properly introduce my co-host, John. It is enough, Burnett. What's up, brother?

I feel honored to be the co-host. I'm the only one. I mean, Chris, you're an honorary co-host.

So Chris is an honorary co-host.

Um, this is the first time I've been a co-host.

Yeah, so Chris, introduce yourself. Who, who are you? How many deals have you done?

Uh, well, I mean, Mark, you and I go way back. I think I, I must have been one of your earlier tranches of students because Yeah. I came into your, your eco— your geeko system in 2014 and went through coaching all the way back then. So we've known each other for, what is it, 12 years now, which is kind of crazy. And right after that, I did a little bit of coaching and then just got too busy with the actual business itself. Um, since then, you know, it took a few years to really get off the ground. My business partner Michael, who you know well, he and I really kind of you know, worked it part-time as we were doing our, our day jobs for the first 2 and a half years. And then 2017, uh, we, we went full-time and went into the business and have done somewhere north of 2,000 deals, 2,000 flips since then.

Incredible, incredible. So if you're just now joining, let me just kind of walk everybody through the model if you've never Heard of Land Investing or The Land Geek, whatever it is. Um, what we do is we buy inexpensive raw land, 25, 35— rural land, 25, 35 cents on the dollar. Then we flip that land and we owner finance it. So we become the bank and we get monthly payments every single month, and we don't have to deal with any renters, rehabs. Renovations or rodents. And the goal is we build a system, a process, an actual business so that we don't just solve our money problems, but we also solve our time problems. So if that's of interest to you, stick around, you're gonna learn more. So Chris, you've sold 2,000— you've done 2,000 deals. Um, and now you're helping us other land investors sell their land. Can you kind of talk, walk us through like your, your adventure in AcreFi and why you guys created it?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it really started because, you know, you, you just hit the nail on the head. You kind of solve a lot of problems by generating a note portfolio. And, you know, it creates problems because you're, you're obviously managing that note portfolio, but Once you get your business pretty systematized, like you're solving a lot of your money problems, right? And that's what we're all trying to do. And so one of the things that, one of the levers we pulled back in 2019 was we redeveloped our site. It was like the 5th time we redeveloped our site, but this time we got professional help. And that really was like a game changer for us. So fast forward though to 20— kind of like the end of 2024. My business partner Michael, he, he was doing a software venture like right before I drug him into the land business. But he kind of came to me and he was like, hey, I can't just flip another piece of land. Like, I, you know, we've, we've, we've built a team, we built systems, like, I, I still love it. Like, let's keep doing it. But let's figure out, you know, I want, I want to just do something new and exciting and like get revitalized, right? So we actually stopped, we, we didn't talk for a whole month. Like, we just did not do any business meetings on the same call. We were like, let's just go and not be, you know, kind of like together all the time in our business and constantly brainstorming. Let's just go to the, you know, like silent places that we can, you know, think and like, what's going to be fun and exciting? And he really kind of seeded it with like, I'd love to do some software. We've been in land, we've built a lot of stuff in-house for ourselves. Like, I'd love to actually do some software. So You know, we came back and, and had just, you know, various ideas, but the one that stuck was, was AcreFi, which is really, it's a purpose-built platform for land investors to build a website that, that works for land investors. You know, there's not much out there. Everybody has to kind of like duct tape together services that are built for other industries. So they'll use Carrot or they'll use, you know, like I remember I was using a WordPress site called AgentPress or AgentPro way back in the day. I've used Squarespace and then since had a few different developers mainly off Upwork like build a site, but they don't know land investing. So we were like, hey, we did kind of crack the code in 2019 and it worked really well. So let's see if we can create a SaaS out of it and roll it out. So that's kind of the story of AcreFi, how it was born at least.

Amazing.

John Burnett, what questions do you have?

So I have so many questions. I saw my first question would be, so ultimately this sprang out of a need that you saw in your own business where you ultimately hired the developer and built out your website. So let's like, can you dig a little bit more into that? Like, what was the need? And then how was that resolved by the website that you built?

Yeah. It was kind of an unknown to me that it was even a need. I didn't realize that. We had stockpiled so many properties over the 5-year period from starting because you buy a property, you sell it on terms, and 20%, 25% of the time it comes back to you through a forfeiture. And so then you get it back and then your inventory continues to grow. Plus you're buying properties at the same time. And at that point, we had actually brought on some private capital. So we were able to scale up pretty large with other people's money, which was super helpful. But it solved our acquisition problem as far as not having money. We were able to acquire properties, but now we're just stuck with a ton of inventory. And we were trying to figure out another way to sell it. And at that time, I joined a group of entrepreneurs. And a lot of them were pretty heavily focused on e-commerce or digital marketing. And, but they were all living in the online world, you know? So we'd come to this group and we'd say, hey, this is my problem. What's your problem? And we'd share, like, what are your bottlenecks? And ours was we just had a glass ceiling. We couldn't get over a certain number of sales and we were just stuck there like for a year. And I thought the problem was we need more leads. And we need better quality leads, and/or we need to do a better job with our sales. Our salespeople need to do a better job and maybe like more follow-up or, you know, just better sales conversations, whatever the case may be. But by looking at the actual numbers, one of, one of the gals in the group, her name was Danielle, she, she actually sat down with me and she was like, hey, like, let me see your analytics on your website. So this was pretty telling because she's like, your bounce rate is high, your site is slow, it's not performing, it's not mobile optimized. And I'm sitting there looking at it like, oh man, this is like the 4th or 5th iteration of this website that we've gone through over 5 years. And she's like, you know, you're not your customer. You're not a land buyer. You're a land seller. You might think you know your customer, but you don't. And a lot of people buy land Once in their life, maybe more, but usually it's like one time. So she really kind of pointed it out. She's like, you don't have a lead problem. You're kind of burning cash throwing good leads at a bad website. You have a conversion problem. Your website's slow. You don't have a checkout process that's very dialed in. You can't sign a contract on your site, all these things. And you don't need that stuff necessarily, at least out the gate. But if you're trying to do a little bit higher volume, it helps. But yeah, it was really neat to sit with her and then find out all the gold that she was just, she knew really well. And to give you a little background on her real quick, she had a design agency and they focused on websites only. They didn't build them, they just designed them. That's it. And she worked with Silicon Valley VC-backed startups that charged like $50,000 to $100,000 just for the design. I mean, she charged them $50,000 to $100,000. Just to design their site. So she pointed out the problem, and then I was kind of sheepish, like, man, I've been doing this for 5 years. I thought I knew what I was doing, and certainly not. So that's how we discovered it.

Wow. And then, like, did you notice a difference on the other side? So, like, once— so you went from, like, didn't realize you had a problem, then all of a sudden you realize you have a problem, you address the problem that you've realized you have, And then what was life like on the other side of problem addressing?

Yeah, so, you know, she, so, you know, she basically was like, hey, I, I can do this, my firm can do this, we can design it for you. And she did this really deep dive analysis on land, the whole land marketplace and other land sites and kind of what was common. And I think one thing that she found, you know, was that there's the land marketplaces So you go to land.com, LandWatch, LandMoto, LandFlip, all the marketplaces, right? And it's common for them to not have necessarily a property map. They have like a long list and then there's filters you can select. And, you know, this is kind of back in the day, but the reason— one of the reasons that they do that is because you, you can't populate a property map of the entire US with as many properties as is on some of those marketplaces. Without causing major issues, like major speed issues. So if you go to Zillow or Redfin, they don't even allow you to see the map until you type in a location. And that's the reason why. So the land marketplaces are like that. But I think what happened is as we started to go online as land sellers, and I mean, Mark, in 2014, we didn't really have a website back then. You could still sell on eBay and you could sell on Craigslist. Website wasn't quite as important in 2014. Now it's like 2026, but even 2019, like you could kind of, you know, you could get by without having a website. It was just, it was more helpful then, right? So anyway, long story short, after she, after she did the whole design process and we relaunched the site, then, you know, we saw sales uptick. And, you know, a couple things that she did, she, she really was focused on a property map. She's like, your customer journey has to be very seamless from the time they land on your website They've got to know where to go and it's got to be easy to navigate and it's got to be familiar. Everybody that's out there buying real estate, they're familiar with Zillow and Redfin. Zillow and Redfin have a property map and they've got filters. So she spent a lot of time with her team digging into what are land-specific filters. And we worked on that with her. So created a Zillow-style property map with land-specific filters. That really helped with the navigation for customers. And then the property listing page itself, once you got to a property, it was easy to understand. The order of the information was well laid out. It was just clear what the buyers were going to buy. So what that did though is it just built a lot of trust. We still had plenty of people call and they were checking in to see, hey, are we real? Are we what? They wanted to ask certain questions that may not have been answered on the website, but they were further along. These customers were further along in the customer journey as far as getting to know us, and we had trust and credibility, and they knew more about the property. So it made the sales process a lot easier on our end. And obviously then we also got more sales.

That's awesome. Yeah, I remember like one of the times when we first started talking about this, one of the things that you said that like really kind of was a lightbulb moment for me was the idea of like, your website should be a salesperson for you, right? And yeah, and it's easy to just have it be that.

I concur.

Oh, I gotta concur. Cheers.

Yeah, Chris, you gotta drink now.

Okay, concur.

Yes. Hey. But yeah, I mean, I think it's easy to like set up a website because, you know, you kind of need to, right? And then you want a spot to just send people information rather than just emailing them a PDF. But that's kind of all that, all that you think of it, right? And so that's been, I don't know, that's been, that's been really neat to see develop.

So Yeah, that was something that she really talked about was people are searching your site when your doors are closed, right? You're not able to answer every phone call and/or every email right away, but they're going to search your site and they're going to know about you way before you ever know about them. And you can see that if you look around, if you look at your site, you'll see people that are crawling it. They're looking around at properties and they're and stuff like that. So that was the other thing on the other side of it. She was hyper-focused on speed. So she worked with our website developer to make sure that it was really, really fast and it was also mobile-friendly. Like sometimes we would see upwards of 80% of our traffic coming from mobile, you know? And, you know, these days we kind of see like 60 to 80, just depending, but a ton of people are on mobile. And because they, you know, when they're browsing land, they're, they're on the phone, probably on their couch or whatever, and they're looking at a property and then they bounce from wherever they find you to your website. So half the time on there, they're on mobile. So that was a big thing.

That's awesome. Well, what would you say? So like with, with our audience, our millions of watchers, so they follow—

2 billion people right now streaming.

I don't know what the world's population is right now. 6 billion, 9 billion, many billions, 7 billion, something like that. Many of them are watching.

Put in the chat if you know how many people are on the planet.

But of the however many billions that are watching right now, some of them have done 2,000 deals. Some of them are looking at just starting. Some of them have a few properties in inventory. So what would you say to the person who is like, they're just starting, like they've got some properties and inventory, um, and they're maybe just starting to think about getting a website? Like, how would you, how would you approach them?

Yeah, I, you know, the website is kind of optional at first, at least I think. As you're just starting, you just got to focus on buying properties and putting them up for sale and kind of getting the motions down. And so I just don't think it's that necessary right out the gate. But as you're starting to get repeatable deals, right? Like you're buying a couple properties a month, maybe you've got 5 properties to 7 properties in inventory, and you're wanting to cycle through those and kind of repeat your business over and over, right? Like go from 2 sales a month to 3 sales a month to 4 sales a month, then a website starts to become more important. And, you know, that's— that it's also an asset for you in many ways. So people start to become familiar with you. You might be investing either on like one of the land marketplaces if you signed up for Land Moto or, you know, Land Flip or something like that. If you're getting people to go from there, it's nice to have a website because then you can drive them to your site And if it's nice and easy to navigate, they get familiar with your site. And then if you don't have the right property for them, which 97% of the time you don't, right? You might not have the property that fits their needs, then you can set up an email capture. So ask them to join your buyer's list or whatever it is you want. But a lot of times you can set up something where they'll put their email in, They'll get something in return, like maybe they'll get flash deals or they just get to be on your newsletter, whatever it is. And that's where you really foster the relationship. And every time you get new properties, you can continually send them out a notification and then get them back over to your website and send them a notification, get them back to your website. And they just kind of get used to shopping on your website. And hopefully if you've got inventory in areas that they want, But maybe they don't have the— or you don't have the right property for them at the time. They'll stop browsing just the general online places, Google, and then the land marketplace, et cetera, for properties. And they'll start to just come directly to your site first. And then when that time's right for them to buy, or you've got the right property, they might not even see other stuff. They might just keep coming back to your site. Back to the beginning of your question though, like, it's more of a nice to have at the beginning, but it's certainly not necessary, I think. I don't know, like, when did you start it out, John? Like, what were you doing at the very—

Yeah, I mean, for me, it probably took me a year and a half to 2 years to get a website, you know. And I actually, I think that, and then when I set it up, I remember I like wasted so much time. And now I'm really glad I, you know, have a website. Right. But, um, but at the same time, you know, I was able to sell a lot of property without a website. I do think, like, to your point, like, in the early stages, it's important to just get your reps in. You know, you need to buy property, you need to list property, you need to have conversations, and you don't necessarily have to have a website to do that. But, but then you get to a point where, no, it's time, you need to get a website, you know. And so So like, and I remember, I remember being in this position where— so we'll go back in time to John Burnett right at the cusp of finding a website. And I'm thinking, what do I do? This person's got this thing that I could do. I've got— maybe I'll just put something together on WordPress, which is what I did. And it's kind of a giant tangled mess, right? And then So if you were talking to somebody like me and I was right at the cusp of setting up a website and I said, OK, Chris, I see this, why is this better than WordPress? Me doing my own thing on WordPress and installing plugins and hodgepodging something together, like what, what would you tell me?

Oh boy, a lot. You know, nothing wrong with WordPress. WordPress is great. In fact, we're We— when we went and built AcreFi, we built AcreFi on React, which is the new, like, top standard of websites and everything because it's reactive. It's, like, really good on mobile devices and all that kind of stuff. And it's fast. But we actually built our acrefi.co, that's our domain name, we built it on WordPress originally. And I'm actually in the process of getting it over to React. So nothing wrong with WordPress. It's more so just— I think going back to, like you said, the early John Burnett or the early Chris Clark, we just don't know what we don't know. We're not land buyers. We're land investors and we're trying to buy and sell land. And so we're just not quite our customer. And I think I didn't know that until 2019 after going through multiple iterations of the site. So AcreFi was developed to, one, just shortcut the learning process. You don't have to go hire a Danielle or find a top-notch designer and spend a bunch of money to have them do all that research. AcreFi did that. It sets the foundation for what a land sales website should have, all those elements, and allows you to focus on just buying and selling land. You don't have to be a website developer. I feel like I spent, I mean, endless hours working with miscellaneous freelancers off Upwork, and then I was kind of held hostage to them if I wanted to get a change, or I was trying to learn WordPress and not investing in land. And so AcreFi is like, okay, it's the shortcut and it's, it's proven. It's proven. So I think that's what I'd— that's kind of what I'd point to there, John.

Yeah, I remember I had, uh, this was maybe a year and a half ago, I had a point where, um, one of the plugins that I have for my WordPress site just was no longer supported. And my entire site just broke. And I rebuilt, I rebuilt my entire website, I think, in 8 hours and was extremely proud of that.

Wow.

Yeah, it was, it was a work of desperation, I guess. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. WordPress, you know, WordPress is, it is good. But yeah, we've had those plugin issues. I was always going in and updating all the plugins, you know, and then like you said, sometimes they would just— either we wouldn't pay for them because we'd forget they had to renew. Like we had this plugin Gravity Forms, which was really expensive. I don't know how much it was, but I remember it being really expensive. And, you know, we'd forget to pay for it and then the forms on our site would break, you know. It was like, okay, enough of this. And then you have to pay for hosting and all that stuff. So You know, with AcreFi, we just try to eliminate a lot of that stuff. You just buy your own domain name, you own it, and, you know, AcreFi is hosted and it's fast, it's mobile-friendly, it's all those other things. But, um, yeah, are you still on WordPress right now?

So I am, but I also am moving to AcreFi.

So, oh, okay, awesome, man.

I know, I've been talking to Jess. So we're, we're getting it rolling.

I know, I know we've been talking with you and trying to convince you, so I'm stoked.

You did it. I'm convinced.

Are you using the discount code, John?

I have a discount code?

Yeah, 20% off with 4SASLANDGEEK.

Actually, I've been trying to get this to work all day. The one bad thing is switching over from React to— or from WordPress, our old site, to um, to React right now is now everything, like the, the codes are all broken. But I'm gonna— I'm just going to manually for the next day until I get this React site up and running. We're like the housekeepers that don't keep our own house clean right now. Like AcreFi and the land websites are great, but the acrefi.co, our, our own site, is not that great right now. So I've got to, uh, I've got to fix a few things. But if you are, you know, with the LandGeek code, you get like a massive discount. You get— so we have a few different options. You can do it yourself onboarding because it's a lot of drag-and-drop functionality inside the platform. And so you can do that. Or if you want to work with us and have like basically white glove onboarding, it's $1,250, but with the Land Geek coupon code, it's $625.

And then Yeah.

And then I was actually going to put together just like a little special offer for this call for 50% off the first 3 months. So, and then Mark and I, Mark's, Mark's getting, Mark's working a deal for Land Geek students that are like new students with flight school to get, you know, essentially like a super discount. So Mark's, Mark will probably roll something out once we agree on whatever that looks like.

I'm twisting arms.

Thank you.

I know you've been very generous.

It's, it's hard negotiating with Mark. I mean, he's been buying land for like, 25— what, since 2000, Mark, or before that?

Did he outpay 25 cents on the dollar?

Yeah, well, that's what I mean. That's what I expect, you know. And so like when it's not 20, I'm like, wait, what? Seriously?

I mean, like, yeah, you can't negotiate with someone that's been doing land as long as Mark. It's just, it's silly.

Yeah, he goes into it actually. Yeah, I'm obnoxious in the real world, you know. I'll go to Safeway I'm like, I'll offer you 25 cents for that avocado. It's like, sir, the avocado is $1.25 organic. I mean, no, no, 25 cents.

That seems fair.

What happens at a car dealership? Do you just put, put a letter on the table, an offer letter on the table? They're like, wait, we're supposed to put the letter on the table and draw the lines.

Yeah, exactly. I'm like, I've never seen him do this before. Like, wait a second, that's our line. Oh, all right. Well, we gotta, we gotta give some love to our, uh, our regulars here. So, uh, since Bossman and Zano are not here, um, Tony Sanders is here. Hello, Tony. Brad Kelly, love seeing Brad. Mike Caviar's here. Scott Christiansen.

Um, @ShredBot1.

I can't— oh, is that— it's, uh, Eddie.

Eddie Dyer, is that right? Eddie. Uh, Charles Jones is here. Um, this is when they were— they're waiting for us to join. We got some funny things here. Liberty Land Corp, share the land. Uh, Chris is here. Michael Martinez. The Mike is here. Um, I don't know who Kev Sjuju96 is, but he's telling us there's over 8 billion people, although Mark Bryan thinks there's 7 billion, so one of them is right. Rick Colcock is here. I understand the company site being broken is like the cobbler's son and his shoes.

I love that.

Yeah, it's Eddie. Eddie. Amazing. So what questions do you guys have for Chris? Put it in the chat. What questions do you have for Chris?

I have a question.

John Burnett, what question do you have for Chris?

So my question is, One of the frustrating parts about my WordPress site is that besides the fact that everything breaks randomly, and I have to rebuild the entire site, other than that, one of the things is duplication of effort, right? So I've got my database, and it's got all the things and my pricing, and it's got the descriptions and the ad copy and all this stuff. And then I need to copy that and I have to paste it into my website. And then if I change something here, I also have to change it here. And like, so everything is always like, there's— with the, the more like redundant you have, or the more redundancy you have there, the more potential there is for human error, right? And so that's always like frustrating to me. So talk to me about— let's talk about the backend of the website. site and how it talks to like the database.

Sure. Yeah. What, what, what are you using for your database?

I use Airtable.

Airtable. Okay, cool. Yeah, we, we used to use Podio way back in the day, which I don't even know if that exists anymore because we, we ended up getting off it, you know, and I can't remember, sometime '21 or '22. But then we looked at Airtable and we ended up going to Salesforce. And so, but I know like a lot of people are are doing Airtable. So we built an integration into Airtable. There's an API basically. So the backend of AcreFi, you can just connect your Airtable. And that way you've got that one source of truth where you can update Airtable with the price of a property or property details, and then it'll just populate onto the website. And then if someone buys a property on your website or you just sell it over the phone and you check out on the website, You can either, you know, you can update Airtable and then the property will show sold on your website. But if they actually go through the checkout process on the site, then the site will communicate to Airtable and say, hey, this property, it's been sold, and it'll mark it sold in your database.

Yeah.

So because we had that too, we had properties where we would sell more than— we'd sell the same property twice on accident, you know, because, you know, I don't know, it was rare, but it happened a few times. And I don't know, it was just kind of embarrassing.

It'd be cool to do like a demo. We'll have to do another call. Yeah, do an AnchorFi demo.

Yeah, yeah, totally. No, we could, we could, we could go through like a 10-minute demo or something like that, and I could probably go through the whole thing. So, but yeah, I'd love to, love to try to answer some questions.

Um, here's the—

depending on Rick. It's possible to access Google Analytics numbers when you host a site? Yes, yes, you can look at Google Analytics.

Well, that's, that's cool. We need, we need the Google Analytics.

Yeah, it's all set up. You can pick, you can, you can put your pixels in. So if you want to do Facebook, like paid traffic, if you're, if you're advertising on Facebook or Meta, um, you can add the pixel there. So that's there. And then you could go retarget folks. Same thing with Google. So you can plug in the Google Pixel in the backend and it'll track people that go to your site so you can get attribution there. And then there's other APIs that are built as well. Oh, we got a pixel for Follow Up Boss if you use Follow Up Boss as a CRM. I don't know how many people are using that, but we've got that set up.

Quite a few.

Yeah, so, and GoHighLevel as well.

So, and, and people are using GoHighLevel as well. And again, if you're just starting, you don't need Follow Up Boss, you don't need GoHighLevel, um, you don't need the website. But as you progress, these are things that are really important, uh, to scale your business.

Yeah, for sure, totally agree. I think, I think, um we used spreadsheets for a long time, you know, like Google Sheets, right? I don't know. I mean, like, Airtable wasn't around back then, I don't think, was it? I can't remember.

No. Um, oh, Jared Bell is here. Here's a great question. What are the most important numbers we should be tracking when looking at our site's analytics?

Good question. I think that Probably time on site is important. Bounce rate is huge. Make sure that people are not—

Let's, let's, let's, uh, let's break that down. What does it mean, time on site, and what is bounce rate?

Yeah, so, so bounce rate would be the first one, and it's going to tell you, you know, if they land on your site, is your site capturing their attention, and are they going to continue on the customer journey, or are they just going to bounce? Like Meaning just jump right off the site. And then so you can get an actual bounce rate.

That's what John said. When John and I go out to dinner and the place isn't like hip or cool enough, when we're coaching live, he's like, let's bounce.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I love it. Um, yeah, so, and then just time on site is really just how long folks are on your site, right? Like, are they on there for 30 seconds? Are they on there for 5 minutes? And I don't even know, I don't have enough data on the overall land space to say, hey, you should have an average of 5 minutes and 30 seconds on a website. But the more time they're spending on the site, the more they're, either they walk away from their computer or they're digging around. So another thing you can start to see is what pages are they looking at? So they can go from the homepage to the property map to a property listing page, that kind of stuff. That's really neat to look at. And then you can get an idea of like, are they following the customer journey that you want them to follow, or are they, you know, getting lost somewhere? So I think those are probably like some of the important tracking numbers if you do have checkout built into your site. So this is— AcreFi is a function where you can— where a customer can check out just like e-commerce. So they can make their down payment and their processing fee or whatever you want on the site. And so you can see how many people are getting to the checkout portion and then how many people are actually checking out. And then after that, there's actually a contract signature portion. So you get to put your own contract in and it's unique to that property and that buyer. And then hopefully they go through the whole process. So I think if you're watching folks on your site, look for bounce rate, look at time on site, and then just see if they're going through a customer journey or if they're just getting hung up somewhere.

I love it. I love it. Do you recommend doing a heat map and watching the cursor and where the buyer is actually clicking around?

Yeah, we have done a lot of that. I don't know if it ever really yielded much change in our site, you know. Like, I don't think we were, you know, we never got that much traffic to really say, okay, like, we're, you know, we're gonna have to shift this over here, over there. Um, the spot where I do remember it being helpful was on the homepage because we wanted them to go from the homepage to the property map. We wanted them to go to that. that property map as the next page in their customer journey so that they could basically go shopping, you know. So we had a button that was on the right side of the screen initially, and then we moved it to the left side of the screen. And I remember we were analyzing CarMax's website a lot. They were a good example for us. So I mean, this was before Carvana was around, I think, but CarMax's site was good. So we analyzed their site a lot and we were like, where did they put their button? Oh, they had a they had a person standing there that was kind of pointing at the button, you know. And but, you know, you're— it's, it's hard because what would be really valuable is if you could see their eyes. Like, seeing their mouse click around is nice, but if you could see their eyes and where their eyes go to, like, that would be huge. But we, we can't do that. So heat maps, super advanced, Mark.

Yeah, yeah, no. And but I, I really love the, the idea of like, let's take a really you know, big company. We're going to assume that they've got millions of dollars of resources that they've put towards the site and just copy it. We don't need to invest it. Sort of like, you know, if I'm going to open up a restaurant or retail store, I want to be on McDonald's corner. I know they've done all the analysis of traffic counts and where the traffic is coming from. Like, Just go where McDonald's goes. Um, same thing with your website. I love it. And look who's here, the Zen Master, Mike Zaino! Better late than never. What's up, brother?

All right, nice to see y'all. Sorry, you know, uh, sometimes the kids needed something, you know. I always, you know, when they get older, I thought like, uh, they need you more when they're older, which is kind of cool. But anyway, happy to be here. Sorry I'm late. Nice to see you, Chris. Been a while.

Hey, what's up, Zaino?

How are you?

I'm doing well.

Yeah. And I'm actually kind of feeling very good about the fact that John and I are getting all this geeky knowledge about conversion rate optimization that Mike's not.

We're gonna edge you out here, Mike.

Those are 3 words I typically don't use in the same sequence.

Conversion. Okay, let's talk about it. So Chris, can you break down what is conversion rate optimization? And how does it apply to a website?

So yeah, conversion rate optimization, or you'll hear this as CRO a lot of times. It is kind of like that heat map, Mark, that you're trying to get people to take the actions that you need, that you want them to take. So conversion doesn't always necessarily mean like you're buying something. You could be trying to convert them into being on your newsletter, right? But it's just that it's like, okay, if you're gonna build a website or a landing page, and you want folks to sign up for your newsletter, maybe you give them access to inventory, like inventory that others won't see. So you say, hey, sign up to our buyers list and you'll get access to inventory that people that are not on our buyers list, they won't see. How many signups are you getting? So the conversion rate would be if 2 people sign up out of 10 people, you get 20% conversion, right? So how do you optimize for that? And this is where you get super geeky. Like, Mark, you'll probably love this stuff. Like, do you move the signup box a little bit further up on the page? Do you wanna make sure that you put it above the fold or should it be kind of right below the fold? In the signup box, do you put the words enter your email or do you just put email address? Do you have them fill out their first name and their last name and their email address or do you just require their email address? Like, what kind of friction do you want there? Some people— want a lot of friction because they want to know that they're dealing with a qualified lead. Some people don't. Like, if you— like, Alex Hormozi would say, hey, put some friction in there, make them put their first name at least, maybe their last name and their email address. And other people would say, look, just get their email address and then, you know, like, now they're on your list, but they might not be as qualified, right? So anyway, conversion rate optimization is just like really trying to optimize your website or the pages on your website to, to get the customer to take the action that you want them to take.

I love it. I love it. And we can spend like hours. And actually, you could spend— it's a thing. Conversion rate optimization is actually a big thing that we don't really talk probably enough about. Because even like a little marginal 1% or 2% difference in conversion rate optimization yields a huge difference to your bottom line and your results. So it's something we don't want to really sleep on, but it's a little bit more advanced. It's more for like, you know, uh, more advanced people. Uh, all right, so Brad Kelly wants to know, do you have connectors to allow access from my AI to the website?

We're, we're trying to build that right now, actually. So we do not, not at the moment, but all right, we, we are going to work on that.

Rick wants to know, can I have multiple user accounts? I would like my VA to be able to access the site as an assistant but not as an admin.

Uh, I think we do have that. Um, I'm not 100% sure. If we don't, that's an easy add. Um, But I will check on that and I will, I'll get back to you, Mark, on that one.

So, okay, cool, cool. Jared Bell's giving you some love. Solid advice, I really appreciate it. I feel like there's tons of data on Google Analytics that means absolutely nothing to me. Well, I love that. Do you guys ever see that Curb Your Enthusiasm where she goes like, instead of laughing, she goes LOL? And Larry gets really annoyed. She's like, why don't you just laugh? Yeah, Brad Kelly agrees capture rate is huge. So, Mike?

Yes.

What— I'd just be curious.

Yes.

For you, how important is the website? And, and getting either people to your, your buyers list, converting sales, building trust. How have you thought about it? Because, you know, John and I've been talking about it now for 3 hours straight streaming.

We have 2 billion people.

It's a 2 billion streamers. But now we get to ask you.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting, Mark. I think it— when people are jumping into flight school, building a land business, a couple of things that come up a lot is like, hey, do I need an entity and do I need a website? And I think that both of those, um, are critical at some point, right? Maybe not initially out of the gate. I tell them, like I always say, deal flow solves everything. What you need is deals in your pipeline. I didn't operate as an entity for the first couple years. I, you know, and you may want to do that out of the gate, but I just wanted to see if I could do it. I got deals and later built that. I didn't have a website. I do now. I mean, it's a great place, especially when you start to grow in the business, catalog your deals. It can show people, you know, a bigger picture of what you're capable of. And I think that they do become, um, it does become very important. But one of the challenges that has always been is like how to, you know, build it yourself, or you try to hire someone on Upwork. And it, you know, I've tried that many times over the years. It can be a true nightmare because they'll promise you anything. Like, oh yeah, I'm gonna build you this great site. And, you know, it sounds great until it starts actually happening. And you end up with something, you're like, oh, that's it? Like, thanks. Like, I feel like I could have did that myself, actually, you know. And so I know, you know, that having the ability to have a website that looks professional and easy to work with is huge. It is. I think I've got a—

I've got a great idea for Chris. I'm gonna write his— I'm gonna write his Upwork ad. Hi, I'm Chris. Yeah, based in, you know, San Diego. I've been a professional land investor since 2014. I've done over 2,000 land deals.

Yes.

And I'm gonna build your website based on how I've sold 2,000 land deals. I honestly, I'd make an offer. That's a—

that is a great idea. That is honestly a great idea.

Right? Like, what a differentiator and what a gift, like, you know, to have somebody who's actually, you know, really in the business with deep, deep knowledge of it making your website.

Yeah, yeah, that's huge, um, to have that ability to have someone help you like that. It really is, because this is one of those things where you really don't want to take it on yourself. There's some things, you know, in our business that you do first, right? We always say learn it first, become proficient at it, and then outsource and delegate it. But then there are some things where it's just not worth the time and effort to learn how to build a website. It's just not. Find somebody.

How about if I play devil's advocate? I go to Google AI Studio. Yeah. And I just one-shot it and I put in a prompt and say, hey, make me a, a land selling website that you know, is going to convert, uh, buyers into customers.

But I've done it now. I've built, you know, a nice AI, um, agent, Nova, and she's got great capabilities. But I still don't like the way that I've had her try to play with sites. I just don't like the way, you know, because it's just the way that it interfaces. I still— I don't think— I, I still wouldn't do that myself right now. I would, I would, I would— if I had to have another website right now, I'd do something like Chris is doing just because It's just plug and play. It's simple. It works. And I don't have to worry about how I'm gonna— because if you're interfacing through the AI, that can get kind of weird at times, um, the way that it populates things for you. I don't know. So, but maybe, uh, Google one is better than— but I mean, Nova— oh, anyway, I don't want to give it away.

But Chris, like, what is your— what is your retort to me saying, oh, I can just have AI build my site?

Yeah, I mean, from, from me building some websites on, on AI, it does a really good job on basic websites. And then, but if you try to get a little bit more complex with it, it's not quite there yet, I think. Um, I mean, it's close, but it's just, I don't know, I think you still end up being sort of that website manager. You're— you've moved from managing WordPress to like managing your whatever AI, like, harness you're using. Because I don't know, I mean, it definitely could be there soon, but it's just not 100%. Just, I've tried to build some cool things and it does a really good job. I just end up spending a lot of time on it, you know, that's the thing. I think the other big thing is, like, you could also learn WordPress too, and you might be missing the design elements of it. And what we were just talking about with the conversion rate optimization and the customer journey, like, that's, that's more so what the foundation of AcreFi does for you. You know, it's got the foundation of like a solid customer journey and it just gives you the foundation. You can customize it a whole ton yourself. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the fees would be for building it on AI either, like for building a website and hosting it. Probably not that much.

Mark, I found like when I built one on the AI, it gets to a certain point, it's going great, then all of a sudden if it goes off the rails, to bring it back, it gets really weird. Because once it starts going in a weird direction and you're trying to tell the AI to bring it, just, it can seem great until it's not, is what I basically found out. It's like, it's going great, it's going great, oh, this is getting great, oh, this is getting really good, then crack, something happens. I'm like, wait a minute, no, don't do that. And it starts to be like, whoa, what do you want? And it starts adjusting it in ways that I didn't. And all of a sudden it's like, oh my God, you know, not into Chris's point, it's been hours, days, you know, messing around with this thing. And all of a sudden it goes, goes south on you and I don't know how to bring it back on track. So I don't, you know, and I'm not, I'm not an AI expert, but I, you know, I'm saying for the— I'm an average person, right? So that can happen.

No, absolutely. And I, you know, look, AI doesn't have any judgment. It doesn't have any taste. And I'd rather trust the person who sold thousands of land deals through their website versus the generic AI, uh, for sure. Um, well, let's land the plane. JB, any final thoughts?

I just think one of my favorite things about AcreFi is the fact that you can add 10 acres to your cart Yeah, you can shop on it just like e-commerce. Yeah, that's awesome. So that's my final thought. Add it. Add 10 acres to your cart.

Add 10 acres to your cart. Uh, Zen Master, any final thoughts? I know you just joined, but I might as well put the pressure on you.

No, my final thoughts is if I had a— like, I have one that we, we built and all, and it works. I still, at some point, have thought about switching over to AcreFi. I've seen what they do. There's no way in this world that I would try to build another one if I had something like this available when I was looking for it. There's just no way. It's just too simple and too good to try to, you know, try to do something different. I wouldn't do it. I would encourage anyone, and I have people that I've talked to, I do tell them because I think it's just, it just makes sense.

Mm-hmm. I do think I really like, Chris, how you were talking about like in the early stages, like you don't necessarily have to worry about having a website. So there might be some people who are listening who, you know, it's kind of like they're watching somebody doing geometry when they're still just learning multiplication. And if you feel like that, like just don't worry, it's not time yet. You'll get there, right? But right now, just focus on, on what you're building.

Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more. I mean, and Mike said the same thing and we were talking about it before you got on, Mike. Just when's the right time to have a website? And it's, you know, get the basics of the business first. Don't become a website builder. Don't worry about a website until you know how to actually like do some deals and then worry about it. You know, when you want to start getting the repeatable sales and you got a little inventory, like, okay, great. Get a website. It'll help at that point. But yeah, I mean, and the other thing too, I mean, just you guys have been awesome to like, I want to jump back on some of these, Mark, if you'll have me. And it's just been super fun and not make it like a full discussion purely about AcreFi. I just wouldn't mind just talking about land because we're land investors first and foremost. This happened because my business partner came to me and was bored out of his mind with pure flipping land, obviously, after 12 years. And he's like, let's just do something new and fun. So this was born, and it's, and it's been really, really cool to do a SaaS business. But like, I don't know, we're land investors, so that's, that's like what's in our blood.

I love it, I love it. Well, I want to thank you, Chris, uh, for taking the time. And for those of you that are ready for a land website, uh, built by land investors for land investors Go to agrify.co and then get a discount, forward slash The Land Geek. If you don't want to save money, just go to agrify.co and give Chris more money. No judgment, it's cool. But if you want to get the discount, do forward slash The Land Geek. He's been very generous, uh, with our community, uh, so that when you are ready for your website, you're gonna have a conversion-rated optimized website Uh, to get you more leads, more sales, more money, so that this investment, uh, you know, it's, it's not— you're not paying anything for the service. It's actually making you money, which is what we love. So, Chris, we'll have to have you back. John, Mike, cheers. Thank you, guys. Cheers to everybody who's on tonight. Scott Boston, we miss you so damn much.

I know.

And, uh, I do not see Scott.

Uh, I'd be remiss if I didn't really plug us as well. Go to landgeek.com/training if you want to learn more about land investing so that you know how to even get a website. Oh, and we should—

should we talk about boot camp too next week?

Boot camp is next week.

Yes, next week. So all of you who are land geeks should sign up for boot camp because it's going to be great. I'm presenting, Mike's presenting, Mark's presenting. It's going to be great. And if you don't know how to sign up for boot camp, book a call with us and we'll get you signed up.

Beautiful.

I love it. I love it. Well, thanks everybody. And Let freedom ring. See everybody next week. Boot camp. Thanks, guys.

See ya.

Yeah.