I saw this post on one of the learn how to wholesale one Facebook post at a time groups about wholesaling “Hey guys, I been trying to wholesale for about a year now and still haven’t got a deal. I’m close to giving up, i don’t know what I am doing wrong??? I quit my job and making calls everyday now and nothing has really changed! I NEED HELP!! 😪
My first question I asked was who was he calling. Because just getting a basic list of home owners, skip tracing and calling is (1) probably illegal and (2) not necessarily the right phone numbers and (3) the LIST is not an overly motivated list.
But as I don’t cold call, I would not necessarily be the person to ask about Cold Calling, instead I generate my leads via SEO, PPC, and Direct Mail.
So the next question on the thread was how do you do SEO and that’s what this post is about.
To generate leads you first one a website that is designed to get sellers to give you their information. The experts call this a highly converting website.
And there are 100’s of different options for real estate investor websites. I have used 4 myself:
- WordPress where I build my own website and wrote a ton of Blog articles around questions that motivated sellers asked or might have asked.
- Realeflow, that is of the notion that you need a lot of mini websites called landing pages that are a basic one-page website to capture leads that you use in different marketing, like direct mail, pay per click, or Facebook ads. Plus you have a main basic website that talks about you. But at least the last time I looked at their main website, it didn’t promote blogging.
- Investor Carrot, that is of the notion that you need a lot of keywords on your website and your design blog articles around questions motivated sellers have or might have so you can use those keywords, a lot.
- REI Blackbook, that thinks you should use Landing Pages so you have targeted marketing around your message that drives traffic to the landing page. But also have the main website with a blogging feature so you can pack in those keywords with blog posts AND it works via a WordPress platform so you can use a lot of the cool tools that come with WordPress.
If you don’t have a website, personally I would stay start with Carrot or Blackbook. Carrot is a lot easier as far as plug and play websites. You can be up and running in a few minutes and they write blog posts for you, but it has a very rudimentary lead management system so you would need sometype of CRM on top of Carrot.. Blackbook you need to do a lot more of the work yourself, but all of their websites feed into their amazing follow up system. Personally I have a Carrot Website that feeds my Blackbook CRM.
So back to SEO, how do you get your website to rank.
Keywords: Well first you want to find a way to pack a lot of key words in intelligent, relevant, articles. Personally, when I started I sat down and wrote out every question I could remember a seller asking me. Then I added every question I though a seller might ask me. Then I created blog posts around those words. My very own keyword list. You can get a great resource for free from Carrot, The Keyword Bible.
Good Blog Posts: Once upon a time I tested out a service that would write blog posts for me, and while they packed in a ton of relevant keywords, they were not written very well. They didn’t sound intelligent and some were downright wrong. So you either need to write them yourself or hire someone who actually knows a thing or two about your business. Then there are a lot of tips and tricks about using headings and bullet points and making it easy for the consumer to read and the Google Bots to read, it helps you in your rankings. And the next thing is to mix in a lot of videos. Not a lot of people use video so if you can find ways to incorporate it in your posts and then have the written article below the video, it helps.
Backlinks: These are sites across the internet that are valuable resources, like search engines, social media and industry pages that are seen by the public and Google as good resources that have links back to your website. So taking the time to set up a page for your business on all the major Social Media Platforms that link back to your website and then sharing key blog posts on that social media once or twice or more a week is good. Make sure you are listed on all the good search sites: Google Maps, Google Local, Bing, Yahoo, Zillow, Yelp and about 50 others. There’s a service that will do this for you MOZ.com for about $450 a year and Carrot has a service for their customers that has about 1/2 as many citations, which is what they are called for $299. And if you can get featured on industry pages, like guest blog posts or podcast guests that link back to your website that’s good too.
Now to put all of the above together is not an instant solution, this is something I would suggest taking time to get set up and setting aside 2 to 3 hours a week to work, for as long as you want a good performing website. Again, Carrot has a great training called 3 Leads Per Day and they also have of late been holding a 30 Day Challenge from time to time. If you want to understand how to build and create a highly converting high ranking website, I would definitely recommend Investor Carrot. But it does take work on your part or you can pay them to do the work for you.
Pay Per Click: But in the meantime, to rank high you can also use Google Pay Per Click Ads so you are at the top of the page every day via Google ads. But again there, just paying for Google Ads can be very very expensive if you do it wrong. I would not go set up Google Ads without help or training. Carrot has a training class on Pay Per Click and REI Blackbook has a great interview with REI PPC Expert Dan Barrett
Our we buy houses website is located in Kansas City, so while we don’t rank #1, we do rank. If you were to do a search for sell my house fast Kansas City or a few other searches with Kansas City, Blue Springs, Gladstone, Overland Park, you are going to find our website on the 1st page somewhere – so look for www.kcmoHomeBuyer.com on those pages.
So if you are trying to figure out how to generate leads with a website, read this article and click some links in the article for further information. Hope this helps!