Marketing is a HUGE part of what real estate investors require to succeed. Whether they do the marketing themselves or outsource it, marketing finds and creates deals.
Everything else you do as a real estate investor is irrelevant if you can’t find any deals.
Investors use many different forms of marketing to find those deals:
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Networking
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Real Estate Agents
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Bandit Signs
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Direct Mail Campaigns
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Websites
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Craigslist
The list goes on and on...
Today we want to deal with – you guessed it – the technology part of marketing. Websites specifically.
But I’m Not Good at Computers
Neither are a lot of investors. Investors are good at making deals happen and making money with real estate. Leave that geeky stuff to the 23 year old living in his Mom’s basement eating Pop Tarts for dinner, right?
Well, not exactly. Your time as an investor is much better spent working on deals than working on websites. So websites might be a good part of your business to outsource. There are several alternatives for outsourcing:
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Ask your brother (the basement guy) to do it – uhh… probably not the best choice
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Send it to a VA offshore – a possibility, but may have some language issues, and they may not understand real estate
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Go to ODesk, Elance or some other freelance website to have it made – may not provide ongoing support once it is up and running
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Find some real estate investors who also understand computers
Let’s go with that last alternative. We found a company that was started by some real estate investors who also happen to be very good at Wordpress. For those of you who haven’t heard of Wordpress, it is quite possibly the most popular blogging and website development software out there on the internet.
The company we’re talking about is Investor Carrot.
The founders of Investor Carrot are both real estate investors and Wordpress programmers. They want to give you a real estate website marketing solution ‘in a box.’ You can have it up and running in no time.
Of course they are not going to create your online presence for free. But take a look at their pricing plans…
The pricing is generally less than hiring a full-time VA and MUCH less than a full website design company. The reason they can keep the pricing low is that they give you templates, rather than design your site from scratch.
You just customize the site(s) the way you want.
Take a look at this demo of the sites they can provide.
As an investor, you will probably want more than one site. Some examples might be:
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A main site to create and raise your credibility
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A site for sellers to tell you about the house they want to sell
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A buyer site to attract and keep cash (or other) buyers
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Rent-to-Own websites to attract people in that niche
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Landing pages to drive traffic to your other sites
The SEC scares the company enough about advertising to private investors that they don’t provide a private lender site. And with good reason.
Investor Carrot can provide templates for all these sites. They will even provide some basic copywriting that has worked on other real estate investor websites.
Each site interfaces with many different types of list-building software such as Aweber and Mailchimp. That way, you can easily create lists of motivated buyers and sellers to track and do deals.
The websites are meant for you to just run them as soon as you register and are set up. However, the folks at Investor Carrot want you to continue to manage them. You should manage all aspects of your business, so this is actually good advice.
But ‘managing’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘doing’ all the time.
Even if Investor Carrot is running your website(s), you will still want to know what is going on with them. That’s why Investor Carrot has a blog, videos and online technical support. They really want to help educate you to grow your business with their websites.
Does Anyone Know You Have a Website?
It’s pretty easy to spend a day on YouTube and see how to build a Wordpress website. It’s a little more difficult to get your website noticed.
That’s where SEO, or Search Engine Optimization comes in.
SEO helps your website get noticed – by the people you want to notice it.
Investor Carrot helps you with SEO as well. Besides providing lots of information and articles on how to improve your SEO, the folks at Investor Carrot also have their sites configured to optimize it.
After each post you put on your blog or website, Investor Carrot has an analyzer tool to see if your keywords are in all the right places.
One key aspect of SEO is that it doesn’t happen overnight. Your website needs to be updated on a regular basis with great content in order to rank above your competition.
Yup. That means you still have to work on your website, just as you work on your business.
Investor Carrot can give you the template(s) for creating great websites, but they can’t run them for you. That’s where you come in.
Holla at Us
How did you get your website up and running? Are you familiar with Investor Carrot? Share below.
Market, Market, Market – The deals don’t find you. Get out there and find them.
Diversify Your Marketing – Use as many different types of marketing as you can. You never know where the next deal will come from.
Analyze Your Marketing – Track the results of your marketing. Which forms are working, which aren’t?
Stay on Top of Your Marketing – Marketing that is not consistent usually doesn’t present great results. You have to keep following up to make things happen. Keep improving all the time.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.