Conversation Marketing in Real Estate Investing

Mike: Hey, everyone. It’s Mike Hambright with FlipNerd.com. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Expert Interview Show, where I interview leaders and entrepreneurs from across the real estate investing industry.

If you’re new to the show, welcome, and if you’re a member of FlipNerd.com or you’re an avid listener, welcome back. Glad to have you. If you’re not a member of FlipNerd.com, please go check it out. You can get a free account in literally about 15 seconds. Pretty easy.

In this episode, episode 288, I’m here with my friend, Trevor Mauch. Trevor is the CEO of Carrot, a software company for real estate investors, and I’ll let Trevor tell us a little bit more about that in just a minute. Hey, Trevor. What’s up?

Trevor: Mike, it’s good to be back, man. I know I was on several months back, and it’s amazing being back. Thank you for the invite.

Mike: Yeah. Glad to see you. You guys are blowing it up right now, and you’ve learned a lot of things. I’m excited that you’re going to share some lessons with us today.

For those that haven’t heard, I’ve said this for the past couple shows, we have a new format here in 2016. We’re still in the early part of the year. We break our show in two parts.

One, is getting to know Trevor and learning some things about him and from him, and in part two, we’re going to get a little more details in a Taking Action segment of the show, where we’re going to get down to the nitty-gritty and Trevor’s going to share some action-oriented steps you can take to take your business to the next level.

So Trevor, for those who don’t know you, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little more about you.

Trevor: As you said, my name is Trevor Mauch. I’m the co-founder and CEO of a company called Investor Carrot. It’s about three years ago is when we officially started it and tried it out for three years. But the process of creating the knowledge and the product and the research was years and years prior to that.

I started investing in real estate. I’m a buy and hold guy when I was 21 and in college. The years after that, from my active income, I’ve always done different things, marketing, consulting, things like that. It led to the web, and I started generating leads myself, from my rental properties through the web.

I started to get my own website, ranked pretty high. I was working with the mortgage brokerage, where I was able to get their website ranked really high, and more leads were coming in. That led into over a period of a three, four, five-year period of me learning really how to generate a lot of leads online to the tune of over 85,000 real estate leads online, over those last seven, eight, nine years.

It’s only climbing now. We actually took all of that knowledge, baked it into an actual tool a few years ago, called Investor Carrot. But now our members are pulling in over 20,000 leads a month from the platform, so it’s really fun.

It’s fun just growing a business with intentionality, and I know this call is where we talk about some really action item and stuff. But before we do, Mike, I want everyone to think on how you’re growing your own business, whether it’s wholesaler or flipping or could be a software company, whatever it is, just be crazy intentional why you’re building the thing. What your big “Why” is.

Also be crazy intentional what your non-negotiables are. I had a list of five things. These five things, if I can’t make the company have these five things, then I’m not going to do it. Come up with your non-negotiables and just push forward and crush it. Have fun with it.

Mike: Are you comfortable sharing those things and what they are for you?

Trevor: Yeah, totally. I sat down before I ever launched Carrot, but I’ve had several companies before that and sold one of them. The non-negotiables were based off the things I did not like about the previous companies I [inaudible 00:03:43]. One of them was my income. I made a really good income, but it was boom and bust.

We would do $120,000 in one month and then 10,000 in the next month, 2 and then 15. While at the end of the year, the income was great, the consistency is not great on your mental mind set. One of the things was it’s got to be a consistent and predictable revenue model. Something that can grow into a really good asset, not just an income stream.

Another one of the things that was non-negotiable, this has got to be fun. My previous company was a great company. We had great products, great team. But I wasn’t very intentional with building fun into the company. With Carrot, you can see the orange shirt. If I was to show you the rest of the office, it’s all carroted out in here. We have things called Carrot Buds. They are these little balls that we have. Mascot. We just placed an order for a thousand more, but we came up with two new characters.

Mike: There you go.

Trevor: This is our Farmer Carrot. You can see it’s all custom made. We made these. We didn’t order them. Some were already pre-made. We designed it and everything. Here’s our Super Carrot. There are a lot of things like that with having fun, so that was another non-negotiable there was having fun.

Another non-negotiable was I want to make sure that we’re building an asset, not just an income stream. Some predict looking for five years, six years, we can grow and do really well growing it. Man, let me pull up something really quick. Another one was live on purpose and work within my unique abilities. My previous company, we were doing great, but I was working too far outside of the things I was truly great at and loved to do.

The last thing, Mike, is a singular focus on the big thing. Same thing, my previous companies, we would try to tackle 42 problems. I would go out there and we would try all the different kinds of marketing, where I would have four different companies running at one time. With Carrot I said, “I’m going to have a singular focus on the big opportunity.”

That’s when I got rid of all my other companies, except for the consulting company, focused on Carrot. Said we’re going to get, insanely get one type of marketing and one type of marketing only, and then we will stack on stuff as we master that. That’s what we’ve done.

Mike: That’s great. I know that stuff’s hard to do, especially for real estate investors because it’s hard to not be boom and bust. I don’t know if I’ve coined this phrase, but I say, “This is a lumpy business.” You don’t buy anything for three weeks, and you buy three houses in one day. It’s just like a rollercoaster, financially, mentally. No doubt about it.

Trevor: So on that topic. This is something because I used to think the same thing about any business. If you’re out there, you’re hustling, you’re the main founder, often times it is boom and bust, even a consulting business. Let’s say you have three clients locked down, each one of them paying you five grand a month.

One of those clients leaves, your income got cut by a third. Two clients leave, your income got cut by two-thirds. So what I’ve found with growing this company, with wholesalers can do it as well a house, flippers can do it as well, it just takes a little more work on the front end.

With this company, one of the ways I wanted to make it consistent and predictable, but also deliver insane experience for our customers. I went into it saying, “No longer am I going to try to run my business, as a lifestyle business and have it be just mainly me,” which sounds kind of funny. Because everyone’s probably listening to this going, “Okay, but that’s what I want, as a lifestyle business.”

So what I thought was a lifestyle business before was me working with a bunch of VAs. What I have realized was that put me at the center of this cog or the center of this wheel, where everything always fed back to me, and there really wasn’t the freedom that I thought I was giving.

Mike: Absolutely.

Trevor: Now we’ve got a staff of 10 people and growing. Our payroll is way higher than I ever thought I would ever be paying per month, but we’re profiting more than I’ve ever profited in any other company. I have a higher payroll and everything, and our profit margins are even higher than my previous companies where I had no payroll.

That to me was a big part of it is you can do this as a wholesaler, you just need to take a different approach. You need to go, “Okay, at the start it’s going to be just me, but as soon as I can and as soon as [inaudible 00:07:58].”

Mike: Awesome. Trevor, the one thing that you’ve become good at, why don’t you tell us what that is, and let’s dive into it a little bit.

Trevor: The marketing side, like I said, one of our non-negotiables was have sole focus on the big thing, and that means everything, your business model, what we’re going to focus on for us also meant marketing. With marketing, the highest return on investment marketing that we ever did in my previous companies was always content, like we were always putting on great content, and we were getting the content to show up in search engines, whether it’s in videos or articles, whatever.

It takes time. But the thing that we’ve found, it’s like a freight train. Once it gets momentum going, Mike, it keeps on growing. It keeps on growing, but the work goes down. So the cool thing about it is you put a lot of work up front, it’s like a freight train or a snowball rolling down, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, but the work goes down.

If you look at a lot of other types of marketing that we were doing, let’s say pay-per-click or direct mail or doing live events or whatever it could be, knocking on doors, whatever it is, it’s really a one-to-one relationship. With pay-per-click, which I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, because we also do some pay-per-click a little bit. But with pay-per-click, you cannot have the leads come in, unless you’re putting the money in.

Mike: Right. You stop advertising, and you’re done.

Trevor: Exactly. Direct mail, you cannot have the leads coming in, unless you pay the money to have the direct mail piece ship your mail out. With content marketing, or I like to call it conversation marketing, you can put those content pieces out there in a very strategic way. Optimize them. I’ll teach you how to do every part of this today, if we have time.

And then that content’s up there forever. So as long as you did the right steps to get it in front of the people who are going to be your prospect, that content piece is going to be there ranking well in a year, but you put in the work to do it this time.

Eighty percent of our own business here at Carrot is eating our own dog food. It’s tapping into the conversations our prospects are already having online. Finding what kind of content we can put in front of them, that’s useful to them, that helps them, and that they get it online.

We basically rank it well on Google, and that’s the majority of the leads that come in for our members. The 20,000 plus leads a month, sellers, buyers, rent-to-own tenants. The majority of those leads, about 70% of those leads are from that exact method. It’s not from pay-per-click, it’s not from direct mail, from conversation marketing.

Mike: Awesome. So you build websites for real estate investors that end up becoming their lead generation vehicles, and using content, and tapping into conversations to bring those leads to you. Why don’t you talk for a minute about how your service benefits other investors, because I’ll say this.

I know this for a fact, because I’ve had a lot of coaching students and mentoring folks, and I have a lot of experience in the real estate investing industry. The best real estate investors are the ones that are not good at building websites or creating content or really doing anything. They probably, tend to be great sales people, and they’re out there making stuff happen. But obviously, you don’t have a sustainable business, unless you have all those other things in place to help you sustain over time.

Talk to the real estate investors out there and say, “When you hear these things like we do these things, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to do it all or you need to go build this or whatever.” Just how people could start to get into the mind frame of, “Okay, I need to find people to help me build this business around me.”

Trevor: Man, and what you said there about the mind frame, that’s the biggest thing. Going back to one of my non-negotiables is working within my unique purpose and my unique abilities, as much as possible. I’m not a techie either. I own a software company, but I’m not a techie. I don’t know how to program. I don’t know how to code. I can use WordPress and set up stuff, but it’s like pulling teeth for me. It’s not what my value is.

If you’re watching this video, listening to this podcast, and you’re like, “I just really love negotiating with sellers. I really love going out there and do an actual fix and flip side of it,” and it’s like pulling teeth for you to log in online. Like Mike said, you don’t need to do the work yourself, you just need to have someone or a system that helps get that result for you or make it happen for you.

All the things that are involved, as an example here. So if you’re to go out there and set up your own site, completely do that if you’ve got that skill, and if that’s your best use of your time. You’ve got to go out there and find a hosting company, then you have to go out there and build the site. There’s a lot of ways you can do that. It could be WordPress and getting a theme. It could be hiring someone. It could be one of those free or cheap website builders.

Let’s say you get a website up, that’s the easy part. I can literally go to one of those free or cheap website builders, click a couple buttons, and have a website online. Now that’s where a lot of people stop, and that’s why they don’t get good results because they’re not an expert in performance. They’re not an expert in conversion optimization, getting someone once they land there, to actually convert into a lead.

Even the guys who are doing 20 deals a month, they’re probably not conversion rate experts. They’re probably experts in whatever it is in their business that got them to that 20 deals a month. It could be the negotiation. It could be their other marketing, or whatever.

We’re finding that even just those differences in the performance on a website. So making a website, convert. Let’s use this as an example, use round numbers. Let’s say your motivated seller website converted 5% of everyone who landed on it into a lead. So five people out of a hundred would become a lead for you. That’s awesome.

But what if your website could convert 8% of everyone who landed on your website into a lead? That’s an extra three leads per hundred visitors. Let’s say you get a hundred visitors per year, that’s an extra 36 leads per year. How many leads do you have to get, especially online leads to close the deal? Our average in our system is about 16 leads per deal with online leads. That equals two extra deals a year, by doing nothing other than having your website that performs just 3% better.

Mike: Right, and what is that worth to you?

Trevor: Going back to that, if you average, let’s say 15k in profit per deal, you just put an extra $30,000 in your business that year, by doing nothing else other than changing your website platform into something that performs better. So if you’re out there and you are an active investor.

And let’s say that you’re trying to be an active investor, and the web stuff is just not something that you’re good at, as an example with our system, and this is in the sales pitch. I’m just going to walk you through how we identify the problem and tackle it. You guys could find what’s right for you.

Let’s take care of the first 60% of the on-page SEO stuff, and that’s one of the reasons our clients are ranking so well is we take care of the first 60%. You don’t have to be an SEO expert. And then we walk you through and we have training and really great support to help you with the other 40%. It’s all a la carte, like you can do it all yourself, if you want to, or you go, “Hey, I don’t want to do anything.” We also have services and our team members on our team, who can dive in and do everything for you, for a fee of course. That’s the approach that we took.

Our mission in our business, and this is written on our website. You guys can find it on the About page. Our mission is to create amazing tools, softwares, support and training, that help entrepreneurs do more of what makes their hearts sing, and less hassling with tech and marketing issues. That literally is our mission in our business. We implement all these things around our ecosystem, so you as an investor, have less hassle with tech and marketing issues.

Mike: That’s great. Important thing that I tell a lot of people is that the importance of treating your real estate investing business, like a business and not a hobby. I’m not a big believer in all the people that say, “If you’re flat broke and don’t have any money, you can be successful in real estate investing.” You can be, don’t get me wrong.

But you generally need to invest in your business, to have a business. Otherwise, it is just a hobby. If you say, “I’m not going to have a website. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do everything myself,” which inherently, you’re not going to be good at everything. You never get out of that cycle of truly being a business.

Trevor: Going back to one of the non-negotiables. Number one, you guys should make your own non-negotiables. Number two, the one I think that has made the most difference for me, personally anyway, was the first one. It was the last one I mentioned, but the first one on my list. It’s focused solely on the big thing. With you guys, focus on what you’re really great at and what you’re not great at, and focus on what that big thing is going to be that you’re going to be the best at.

In your market, there could be 400 wholesalers in your market, or let’s say, hardly any of them are tackling fire damaged properties as an example, or hardly any of them are really tackling inherited houses in a big way. They’re all going after the foreclosure stuff or whatever.

You just focus in and go, “Okay, for this next four months,” I’m not saying I’ve got to pigeon-hole myself in this forever. “For the next three or four months, I’m going to be the person, that if you inherited a house in Orlando, or in whatever city, I’m going to be the person who’s the most logical and effective step for people to go to.” Nail that with crazy focus, get that down, get the absolute lead source coming in for you.

Then you can go, “Okay, now let me do the same thing for divorce. I’m going to tackle and just build these relationships with all these attorneys. I’m going to rank well, rank my content really well, my website really well for basically people looking to sell a house from divorce.” Full focus, crush it for two months or a month, and then move on and move on and move on.

It’s like making a brick wall. A lot of people, they have the wheelbarrow full of bricks, and they try to do everything. They’re trying to do all this marketing. They’re trying to do all these strategies. They’re flipping, they’re wholesaling. They were doing rent-to-own. They’re also doing four other things they are trying. “Oh, by the way, I’m also a multifamily investor.” They’re trying to do it all.

That’s kind of locking it up with your wheelbarrow, wanting to build a brick wall, and tipping your entire wheelbarrow over, you’re going to have something there. The bricks will be stacked, but it’s going to be in a haphazard way, instead of a wall. It’s not something that’s going to bounce a ball back to you. Instead, you go, “Okay, I’m going to take this one brick, I’m going to stack the brick, [inaudible 00:18:47], take it one at a time, and do it with intentional [inaudible 00:18:52]. You can bounce a ball off of it. It can actually do something for you.

Mike: That’s great.

Trevor: Don’t dump your bricks. Don’t try to make a brick wall, by dumping the wheelbarrow full of bricks on the floor. Take them out one at a time. Be intentional about the one you’re laying, and build a wall, not a pile of bricks. That’s what too many people are doing is they’re trying all this stuff, mastering one or two at a time.

Mike: That’s awesome. So Trevor, are you ready to take action? Are you going to tell us how to take some action today?

Trevor: Yes. Yes I am. You and I we’re talking about what to really to dive into, and I’m excited about it because this one thing is what’s generating 70 to 80% of the 20,000 plus leads a month that we’re helping our members pull in.

Mike: That’s incredible. So tell us what we’re going to talk about today.

Trevor: You guys probably heard of SEO. You guys probably heard of content marketing even. Those phrases, we’re very good at those. But for me, those phrases, they’re really ambiguous. You can’t hear content marketing and go, “Oh my gosh. I have a good feeling for what it is.” Content marketing seems like it’s hard, it’s work. As soon as you hear content marketing, what goes up in my mind is, “Oh my gosh. I’ve got to create content.” And that’s work.

We started to shift the way that we think about content marketing. We call it conversation marketing now. The reason we call it that, I’ll show you guys exactly what we do. I’ll walk you through it, tell you guys a very specific thing to do, an exercise to walk yourself through on this call. By the end of it, you’re going to have five, six, seven very, very drilled down and effective pieces of content that you can create, and I’ll show you guys how to create them as well, so it’s easy for you. It doesn’t take a lot of time. You don’t have to be a professional writer to do it.

With conversation marketing, basically online, Mike, as you know, everyone goes to Google. Everyone whips out their cell phone or they’re on their computer, and they have a question or a problem or whatever, you go to the web. Really, there’s only three reasons people go online. For entertainment, for commerce, to purchase something, or to get an answer to a question.

There might be another reason, I don’t know. But if you guys have another reason, throw it out. So you really need to go in there to buy something, look at cat videos or whatever, or to get an answer to a question.

What we’re looking at mainly here is the third one, it’s the answering the questions. Let’s say it’s a motivated seller or a cash buyer or a rent-to-own tenant, whatever it is. Those people every single day are going online and whip out their cell phone, and they’re typing up, “Oh my gosh. I’m going through a divorce,” as an example. I am not.

Mike: Right. The example you’re giving, I understand.

Trevor: As an example, let’s assume that I was.

Mike: Right, right. Got you.

Trevor: So going through divorce, and I’m getting my phone. You go, “Okay, so I need to sell this house because we need to figure out what to do with it.” It needs to be done kind of quick, and I don’t know that we have room for the real estate agent fees and whatever, we just want to get it done. So I’m going online, and I might type, “selling a house in divorce in Portland,” as an example. There’s a lot of other phrases that someone that’s going through that situation may be typing.

Or let’s say, I inherited a house, and you’ve got to do something with it. There’s you and your two siblings have to deal with it. You guys aren’t sure what the tax consequences are. You guys aren’t sure what to do with it. So you’re probably going to hit the web to ask certain questions. How to sell a house I inherited? Selling an inherited house, tax consequences, whatever.

What they’re going to do is they’re going to be clicking the websites that show up there high. They’re going to be engaged in those websites, the ones that are most useful to them, or the ones that answered their question and are useful and build credibility are the ones that they’re probably going to end up working with.

Every single day, you guys who are watching this, you do this yourself. We’re hitting the web, we click in the first three, four or five results, we engage with the website that builds the most credibility with us. We’re not thinking about it. We’re not going, “Okay, is this website building credibility with me?” It’s just a feeling you have.

Mike: It’s updated, it’s current. Whatever.

Trevor: It’s updated, it’s current. They’re useful, they’re providing useful content. They’re not hammering you over the head with [inaudible 00:23:14] something like that. So that’s what we do.

The model that I would show you, exactly what we do when we go into a market. Let’s say we’re going in Cincinnati, and we want to start tapping into the conversation. We want to start getting motivated seller leads in Cincinnati. The first thing I’m going to do, Mike, is I’m going to launch a website, of course.

Ideally, don’t spend months creating one. Just get one launched because it’s going to take you several weeks, or a month or two to start getting traffic to it anyway, so get something up there. Get the SEO built on it, we’ve got a whole different column in SEO, but get that stuff going on it.

But the first thing I would do, I would get on my whiteboard or I would get out a piece of paper, and I would write down all the reasons that someone may want to sell their house in Cincinnati.

I would suggest everyone do this right now, and I would go, divorce, there’s inherited, there’s relocating, there’s foreclosure or behind on payments, there’s fire damage, there’s a bunch of other reasons. I’m sure. Those are the ones at the top of my head. Write those down. It could be bad tenants, tired landlord, there’s a billion reasons.

Write those down at the top of the paper or at the top of your whiteboard, and then right below each one of those reasons, what we’re going to do now is we’re going to go, “Okay, let’s look at inherited.” I’m going to go online. I’m going to go to Google. Everyone has experienced this when you go to Google and we start typing something, how it starts bringing up suggested searches. That’s like the easiest and it’s free tool to tap into those conversations that are happening in your market.

Mike: Because Google’s serving up the most commonly searched phrases. Is that right?

Trevor: Yeah, yeah. Google gets that data out of actual searches happening. It only serves up a suggested search, if enough people typed that in every month that it matters to Google. So they’re not going to serve it up, if someone typed it in once or if they typed it in every now and then. It’s something that is consistent enough, that they’re going to serve it up as a suggestion, to make your life easier in your search experience.

So those are the conversations. Those are the conversations that are happening in your marketplace. The question is, are you guys joining the conversation? Are you guys joining, or even better, are you controlling the conversation?

Let’s say we’re looking at the inherited thing. I’m going to go to Google. If I inherited a house or was inheriting a house, I had certain questions. I’m going to go there and start to type what I would think in my mind. I would probably type, if I inherited a house I need to sell. So sell my inherited house, and do it really slowly.

Type that in really slowly and see what Google suggestions are because that’s giving you ideas. That’s giving you a conversation, then now you can engage in, in your market. Write those down. So every one of those that looks good, write it down.

As an example, I’m going to do this behind the scenes. I know you guys can’t see my screen right now, but I’ll be reading these off. So I’m typing really slow, “Sell in,” I’m talking this out as I’m typing it. All I have right now is, “Sell in the inheri,” I don’t even have the whole word inherited, “Sell and inher,” and now it’s giving me suggestions, “Sell an inherited house, sell inherited property, sell inherited house taxes, sell inherited house capital gains.”

All these things are things that [inaudible 00:26:39] about when typing into Google. Where the key comes in is write all those down below the word inherited on your piece of paper. Even do some words. Do other variations of it.

Mike: This is kind of a keyword, where you would typically call it, keyword research, right?

Trevor: Researching keywords or I like to call it, finding conversations.

Mike: Yeah, okay.

Trevor: This is finding conversations that we’re trying to do. The “How to sell in,” right there, “How to sell an inherited house, how to sell an inherited property,” so I can go all day long and probably find 30 different conversations or key phrases that people are typing in. Write those down below it. Now the key is we’re going to add our location now at the end of it. This is how you start to get local results and actually rank well for them.

What a big mistake a lot of people make is let’s say, they’re going after the keyword, how to sell an inherited house, or the conversation, how to sell an inherited house. They might write a blog post or do a video on that topic, and maybe even they actually use that as the title of the thing, which is what you should do. You’re competing against all these other pages and websites and pieces of content from the entire world, but you haven’t localized it into a geographical area that you can help that person.

So take those keywords and write your location at the end of it. For instance, Cincinnati. I got, sell an inherited house in Cincinnati. Dude, I’m taking that. I am now creating content on that. So right there, immediately, we’ve already created five, six, seven pieces of content in very specific titles that we know people are typing in into Google. They’re starting the conversation, we now need to join that conversation.

What I do, Mike, to make it really easy. Not everyone is comfortable in front of video, and that’s fine because you don’t have to be. But my method, let me address that really quick to you on the video side of things.

Mike: I literally just wrote down video versus written, because video is easy. I would say I do a lot of videos, so I’m really comfortable with that. Writing, I don’t like it so much, but the question is which one? The video. I would say a lot of people watch video. There’s a lot of movement on video, but which one ultimately, from an SEO standpoint and from a user standpoint is best, I guess.

Trevor: Mike, what I always like to do, I like to do both. You start with the one that you’re good at and is the most natural to you, and then you put it into a process, so the other version of it is done for you. This is the way that I do my content. Let’s say I’ve got those keyword phrases. I’m going to create a piece of content and I’m going to join the conversation on how to sell an inherited property in Cincinnati.

I’m going to get up my webcam on my computer and I’m going to dive right in. I’m going to say, “Hey, this is Trevor with Cincinnati Property Buyers. We get a lot of questions from people with inherited houses in Cincinnati market, and you may be having the same questions yourself, if you inherited a property.

You might be wondering about the taxes, what tax consequences are there. You might be wondering about your options, what are your options to actually sell this property you inherited. The process, how long its going to take, that kind of thing.”

In this video, I’m going to actually going to walk you through the tax consequences of selling your inherited house in Cincinnati, and I’ll just talk you through it. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to take this video, I’m going to send it over to, it could be a VA or someone, and have them transcribe it.

So they’re transcribing my words. You’ve got a blog post, 90% way done now. All I did was I was on three minutes on the video, sent that video to a VA on a service like Guru.com, or there’s a lot of services out there that can take a YouTube video and transcribe it for you.

Mike: Yeah. We transcribe all of our shows. Of course, it’s written as we’re speaking it, so it’s not turned into an article per se. It’s actually verbatim. We use Speechpad, which is like a dollar a minute. Sometimes our show comes out before the transcription is back, and people are writing like, “Hey, I like to read the transcripts.” I’m like, “Man, who? I never thought that people actually read those.” We thought it was more like SEO fodder, but people apparently read them.

Trevor: So the transcript is great, and like you mentioned, it doesn’t come out in an article format. Same thing, there’s all kinds of people who could edit content. Let’s say you spent three minutes doing this one video on this topic. You send it to someone on Guru.com or Speechpad or whatever, to get it transcribed. You said a buck a minute?

Mike: Yeah. I mean, you could definitely have VAs do it for a lot cheaper.

Trevor: Yeah. Well, still. Let’s say I have a four-minute video. That’s four bucks.

Mike: Right, right. Exactly.

Trevor: So it cost me four bucks to get it transcribed. And then you can find another person on one of those outsourcing websites, or even someone just local on Craigslist or someone who is a copy editor. We actually have a copy editor that works for us, not full-time, but does a lot of projects for us. She’s a full-time mom, but writes for the newspaper and copy edits for the newspaper. She charges 10 bucks an hour, and she’s very good. So we have her taking all those things and turning it into an actual article.

The full cost of the whole thing is literally under 20 bucks, under 50 bucks, if you find those people. It took you three or four minutes to shoot the video, that goes to Speechpad, they transcribe it. You send that to your copy editor, who you’re paying 10 to 15 bucks an hour or per piece, that costs you 10 bucks or 15 bucks, make it into an article.

You take both the video and the article, and put it up on your blog. Title of it is that exact keyword phrase that Google told you, just with your city. And you take that video and upload it to YouTube, exact keywords Google told you with your city, how to sell my inherited house in Cincinnati.

Mike: Awesome.

Trevor: I literally sit down there and I’ll do six, seven, eight, nine, ten videos at once, just to get it done. And then get those off to the person transcribing, have my copy editor tweak them up into nice articles, and we put them on our platform on Carrot. You guys can do that on WordPress or whatever.

Mike: Sure.

Trevor: The power about this, people might be looking at this and go, “Oh my gosh. There’s several steps there.” But really, you’re talking about finding the content method that resonates with you. If you love writing and you’re just not a video person, just write your answers. Type your answers out.

Let me hopefully banish your fear of getting on video. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, obviously. You can obviously do deals without ever meeting the seller. You definitely can. But someone is likely going to have to talk to the seller or meet them.

Mike: Right.

Trevor: So if it’s going to be you meeting the seller or talking to them, you’ve got to be comfortable talking in front of people anyway, and it’s going to be your same face. Your face does not change, if it’s on YouTube video or if you’re in front of a person. It’s your same face.

Mike: Right. It’s usually hard to get rid of that, too.

Trevor: It’s hard to get rid of.

Mike: There are some ways we won’t get into.

Trevor: You’ve got to be really comfortable to be able to get your message, and get it in front of people. If you’re afraid to put a video up of yourself online, you’re probably going to have hesitations in getting in front of people, so you need to get over that fear.

You need to get over that fear because that’s going to build credibility and trust with you online is getting your face out there, so when people call you up, they’re talking with you or they know that you have a staff of people that they’re going to be talking to, stuff like that.

Mike: This is all great information. What you’ve just added here is fantastic. Hopefully, people are taking notes there. With the example you gave, of jumping on a video for a few minutes, it’s so easy to create that content, that do it in batch mode, have like 10 topics you’re going to talk about and just knock them out, and you can really create a lot of content quickly.

The only thing I found is I used to try to think of ideas. I’ve got some time, I want to write something. Also, I’ve got writer’s block. I can’t figure out what I want to write about, or create videos, or whatever.

Then I realized, I just need to keep an idea log, so that whenever I get time to create some content, I don’t have to think about what am I going to create today, I just go to my log, “Oh yeah, let’s talk about that one today.”

Trevor: Exactly. I love it, man. In this method that I walked through in this call, it is basically getting your idea log started. I’ve got to have a place to start, to know how I can join these conversations and what conversations. And that’s where we got the divorce, the inherited, fire damage, whatever. You guys would be surprised what phrases people are talking online. I’m going to go online right now.

Mike: You could be at the airport or somewhere else, you’re doing your research like you’re talking about here, put them in into a spreadsheet or a log of ideas. You’re not going to be recording videos probably at an airport, but just breaking apart those two parts of the process.

Trevor: Exactly. I want to Google right now. I started typing, “Sell a fire,” and all I got through was, “D-A-M, sell a fire,” and Google suggesting, “Sell fire damaged house, how to sell a fire damaged home.” So people are typing that in.

If people are typing that in, that means that people are starting a conversation, and they’re looking for someone to join that conversation with them, and help them. They have a problem, they need help. It can be you, and you can be the person who is doing that.

Who do you think they’re going to end up working with? If they land on a website that does not talk about fire damage hardly at all and it doesn’t have any useful info for them, or if they land on a website that has a full page just on how to sell a fire damaged home.

The whole focus of the page is just on how to sell a fire damaged home, and you walk through maybe in video and writing in there, how they can do it. And you give them some very useful stuff, “Oh by the way, we can actually purchase your fire damaged home for you. Here’s a form to fill out. Let’s talk.”

Mike: Absolutely. Trevor, if folks want to learn more about onCarrot, Investor Carrot, any of the things you’re working on, or get a hold of you, we can add a link down below the video here. But where would you recommend they go?

Trevor: Honestly, man, the best place to connect to me, personally, is probably on Facebook. Facebook.com/TrevorMauch. I think it’s all one word. M-A-U-C-H. Or engage with us over at our website. I know you have a link below this video. I know you have a link below this video that they can find this, but I’m not really too active in Twitter. I’m not really too active on a whole lot of other social media stuff. It’s mainly engaging with our clients a lot.

I do publish things on what I’m going through, as an entrepreneur, on my personal blog. You guys can find me at TrevorMauch.com. That’s T-R-E-V-O-R M-A-U-C-H.com. I’m going to start publishing a lot more consistently over there, now that we built up our team at Carrot. That’s the stuff I love to write about anyway.

Mike: I’ve seen you put some blogs out about some of the things we talked about today even. It’s been shocking, I like to see that. “Man, this is so detail-oriented. It’s so good.” In the context of me writing a blog, I was like, “Man, there’s a lot of work that goes into this.”

Trevor: There is, man. There is. I’ll wrap this conversation marketing in a bow for people because like I said, that the one thing that’s going to pop up in people’s mind is, “Oh my gosh. This is work. I don’t have the time for it. Is worth it?” It does take work, just like any real marketing method that’s sustainable. It does.

The good thing about this type of marketing is it’s not a one-off thing. It’s not creating a direct mail piece. It goes out one time, you’ve got to replicate that thing 400 times. When you put up a piece of content and do what we teach to get it ranked well, it’s up there. It’s going to bounce around, but it’s there now. That same piece of content you did today, we literally have pieces of content that we did two years ago, but they’re still ranked really high for the keyword phrase that we went after and getting us leads every week.

So this method stacks. Your return on investment goes up, as you go, which I can’t think of any other kind of marketing that continually goes up. There is a cap at some point, but it continually goes up and up and up, as your cost and time goes down, go the opposite direction.

The last thing is completely get out of the mind set that you don’t know what content to create, because you’re creating content every single day already, you’re just not recording it. When out there making offers, you’ve been out there walking the houses, you’re talking to sellers, you’re creating content already. What do you think HGTV’s Flip or Flop is? Tarek and Christina, they’re actually Carrot customers. Guys, they’re doing exactly what you are already doing everyday, they just happen to be filming it.

Content is easy. We’re already doing it. We just need to be pulling that content and be conscious about taking it and getting it online, and intentionally going after those conversations or keywords that people are typing in.

Mike: Awesome. One thing I’ll say is you could extend this even to social media. Social media can get carried away, but building relationships, building up your network is just be, as you say, aware and conscious of what you’re doing and just strategically go after how to build up your reputation in the industry, if that’s something that matters to you.

Trevor: Yeah, totally. Dude, content’s a great way to do it. As an example, let’s say you’re creating this one. Everything starts with that three-minute video. So you created that three-minute video, which got transcribed, gets edited up so it’s an article. Now you’ve got two pieces of content. That video goes up on YouTube, so you’ve got two potential things that could get the search engines for you.

Now you take that YouTube video and the article, you share it on your Facebook page, your LinkedIn page, your Twitter, your Google+. So that one three-minute video now, turned into all these different touchpoints.

I’ll take it one step further, this is advanced stuff. We then repurpose our content even more. So we got this video, we got an article out of it now, we amplify it on social media, to get more people to see it. Then we have a guy, he’s in the office next door right now, strategizing with another team member, that then takes our video or an article, and turns it into a slide presentation, very simple slide presentation.

We take that, upload it to SlideShare.com or .net or whatever. LinkedIn just bought them. And you optimize it for the same keyword phrase you’re going for there, because sometimes SlideShare.net will actually show up high on the search engines.

Mike: So they’re taking your video, and basically taking screenshots from that training into a slide?

Trevor: It could be taking screenshots or it could be just whipping up . . . We have a slide presentation template. Basically, it’s a Google Drive slide thing, so our whole team can collaborate on them. We’ll start with that one or two templates we have, and Brendan will sit there and watch the video or read the article, and just take snapshots. He won’t take a screenshot of the video.

Mike: Okay, kind of pulling bullets out of it.

Trevor: Turning bullets out of it and putting pictures on it, so it actually looks like an engaging slide on presentation. It takes 10 to 15 minutes. It all started with that three-minute video, which turned in six, seven, eight, nine pieces of content.

One other thing we’re doing, Mike, which you guys should do this for sure, dude, is you’re creating so much content when you do this. Do all the repurposing, and then you’ve seen on Facebook how some of the most shared and engaged with posts are often times, is quote posts. It’s like an amazing picture with a quote on top of it.

Most of the time, people, myself included, most of the time, we share quotes from other people. That’s great because that gets people engaged in your posts. It helps to improve what’s called your edge rank in Facebook, which means, the more people engaging in your posts, the more likely your posts are actually going to show to people who follow your page. So that’s one of the reasons those guys do that, is to increase their edge rank. So when they’re trying to sell something, actually shows up to more people.

But what we do now, and this is literally the past . . . we just started about three or four weeks ago, is we’ll take those videos and Brendan watches them or he’ll take our mastermind call recordings, which we have a weekly mastermind call every week with our Carrot customers.

He’ll go through it and pick out five, six, seven, ten little snippets of quotes that are very interesting quotes or powerful things that we talked about, and he will make those quote pictures out of them. And then he puts them into our Google Drive, and now we’re posting a quote everyday.

Those get engaged with a lot more on our Facebook page than something, let’s say to an average blog post. It increases our edge rank. So if you go on now, you’re going to see now that we have posted quotes, but they’re all from me, and I didn’t sit down and write out, “Hey, I’m going to make some amazing quotes.” They came from videos I was already doing.

Mike: Right. Awesome. Well, Trevor, this is a ton of great information. Hopefully, everybody listening and watching got some action steps to take out of this. We definitely appreciate your time today.

We’re going to add links below how to find Trevor, and how to learn more about onCarrot, so I’ll add some links down below the video here. And again, this should be FlipNerd.com/show288. If you’re listening, you need a quick link, just remember 288. FlipNerd.com/show288, and that’ll get you there.

Trevor, thanks so much. Great to see you, my friend.

Trevor: Thank you, and I appreciate the invite. Everyone go out there and take actions. Do one thing that I mentioned today, even if it’s your five non-negotiables, just do the one thing and roll with it.

Mike: Awesome. Take care, buddy.

Trevor: Thank you.

Mike: Bye-bye.

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