How Many Websites Are Ideal For A Real Estate Wholesaler or Flipper?

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house wholesaling marketing

“Mark” tried to cram everything into one website. A page for motivated sellers, a section for buyers, private lenders… even rent to own. He said he was trying to “simplify” and save some money. But little did he know he was actually losing money every year by confusing his motivated house sellers on a website that was also pitching “discount properties”.

Sound familiar? 

So what should you do on your website as a real estate wholesaler or flipper?

And this is a great question.

We’ll dive into that in a clear and simple way in today’s blog post and answer that question based on data with the answer to this… “Whatever makes it easier and gets your ideal prospects to their desired result as quickly and as smoothly as possible in as few steps required to make the sale.”

So, You’re Flipping Houses Or Wholesaling? What Types Of Leads Do You Need Right Now?

You might be wondering how having more than one real estate investing website would even help.

And that is a really valid question!

Because, for instance, if you own a plumbing business in your local town… one website for your company is all that you need.  Right?

So, the main thing to remember with your online marketing efforts when it comes to your website strategy is this…

the more focused you can make the message to the target prospect you’re going after, the better the results you’ll get.

As the famous copywriter, Robert Collier once said…

robert-collier-quote

If you’re not joining that conversation in your prospect’s mind immediately… and you’re cluttering the message with things on your website not related to their problem and how you can help them… your results WILL go down.

So going back to the local plumber scenario… if you did plumbing services and you were also an electrician and did electrical work… you have two totally different services that require a completely different marketing message to effectively sell them your services (and ideally two separate websites).

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Learn more about the differences between credibility websites vs. target market websites and why you need both.

Real Estate Website Design: Credibility Sites Vs. Targeted Sites

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You wouldn’t want to have the person looking for electrical work to have to wade through tons of content on your site about plumbing (a service that they don’t need).

Make sense? 

To say it again… the more focused you can make the message on the website specific to your target prospect (and what they need), the more engaged the visitor will be on your website and the more leads you’ll convert.

Why Is A Targeted Website Message Important?

Now that we understand that targeting your message on your website as much to your primary prospect as possible is important… let’s dive into why having that targeted message is important and works.

In short, we humans get distracted easily (especially online), and removing any chance of guiding your website visitor on the wrong path always improves your chances of making sure the website visitor gets your message and hopefully engages in it by becoming a lead for you.

According to a study, 55% of visitors spend 15 seconds or less on your website.  The more you can engage them and speak to them and their specific problems and needs… the longer you can keep them.

But our targeted websites at InvestorCarrot show a different story… 

how long real estate visitors are on site

Why is that? 

Because we’re not sending a motivated seller to a website filled with content that doesn’t help them a darn bit… like stuff about your cash buyer program, or rent to own houses, or private lender program. That kind of stuff doesn’t matter to them and it just serves as a distraction to knock them off of the path of engaging them and converting them as a lead.

We’ll get into the “why” below here in a sec.

How Many Websites Do I Need If I’m A Real Estate Wholesaler Or Flipper?

The general rule once again is this: How many completely different services are you offering and completely different prospects are you going after?

If you are a local house buyer (going after motivated house sellers) and you also wholesale those properties to cash buyers… those are two completely different prospects for two completely different services you offer.

If you have lease option houses available and are looking for tenant buyers… and are also looking for private lenders… those are completely different services and different prospects.

In both of those cases, we’ve found that it’s much more effective to split those messages into separate websites.

So, if you’re a wholesaler and are looking for properties and looking for cash buyers, those websites should be separate websites.

So a minimum of two websites as a wholesaler in my opinion. 

How many real estate wholesaler websites do I need

You would for sure want a website dedicated to helping motivated house sellers… then your second website could pull double duty as your cash buyer website and main company credibility website (which our “Main Company” websites in Carrot do quite well).

I know there are lots of people out there who will argue with this and will say “You can put it all on one website for sure!“.

And they’re 100% correct.

You can.

But if on every page, the prospect is 1 click away from content that has nothing to do with them… and can even throw them off from the actual message on how you can help them… why would you want to take the chance of muddying the water?

If a motivated seller saw a link that says “Investment Properties 30-50% Discounts”… what do you think will pop up in their mind?

“Wow, if they can sell properties that cheap… I can’t imagine what they’re going to offer me. Darn bottom feeders”

Haha, maybe not those exact words… but even presenting a motivated seller with that content definitely doesn’t help your sale.

The “Across The Table” Test

Real estate website test

One simple test I always run through mentally with my marketing messages is this…

… I imagine myself sitting across the table from my ideal prospect and run through in my mind what I’d say to that prospect.

How I’d find out what their main problem is, their motivations, and what they really need help with.

And then mentally run through how I can help them reach those goals.

In the case of a motivated seller… if you use this “Across The Table” test… would you hand them a brochure that talked about buying their property on one page and on the very next page it tried to sell them a discount property?

Or would you ever in the process of talking with a seller fit in… “Oh, and by the way… if you’re looking for an investment property you can get on our cash buyers list!”.

Of course not.

Why?

Because it has nothing to do with how you can help them in their situation and the only thing doing that does is potentially throw off your actual message of how you can help them with THEIR CURRENT situation… selling their house.

If it doesn’t pass the “Across The Table” test… my rule of thumb is that I try to separate those messages in my marketing as well.

On the other hand… if I’m talking to a potential cash buyer… it is very believable that I may find a way to mention our private lender program, because they may also be interested in being an investor with us as well. So those could work very well on the same website.

Make sense?

With that said, in no way am I saying that you can’t pull in online leads with an “all-in-one” site that is for motivated sellers, cash buyers, lenders, tenants, etc.

I’m just making the case for how much more effective it can be to target your messaging to eliminate the chance that a prospect would choose to not work with you because of a muddied message.

If you lost just 1 deal over a 5 year period because your website spoke to too many different prospects at once… that would cost you a minimum $10,000.

With how easy it is to launch a  real estate investor website on Carrot… why take that risk?

So How Many Websites Do You Need If You Do You Need?

If you’re a real estate wholesaler or house flipper… 

… we suggest 2.

One for motivated sellers and one that pulls double duty for cash buyers/main company credibility (even helps out with private lenders).

Then if you want to attract other types of leads like rent to own or note sellers… those may be great as separate sites.

The one rule of thumb is definitely don’t cram all of those “focuses” onto one site. It’ll kill your performance and confuse your motivated house sellers.

If you are a note buyer/seller… 

… we suggest just 1.

A person selling a note tends to be a person experienced in the process. So sellers expect to go to a “broker” and won’t be confused by seeing notes for sale on the site.

If you’re a buy and hold investor or multi-family investor… 

… one total website for all of your properties works great. Your focusing on attracting tenants. But if you want to attract private lenders as well to partner on your deals… then set up a 2nd website that is a main company credibility site.

Keep it simple. As few sites as possible without confusing the message on your important prospects.

And as always… shoot any questions our way!

See Carrot in Action

Grow Your Real Estate Website’s 
Traffic, Leads, & Results With Carrot’s Online Marketing Software

Trevor Mauch

Trevor is the CEO of Carrot and knows a thing or two about inbound marketing and generating leads online in the real estate industry. As an investor himself, he's generated tens of thousands of real estate leads and is a leading expert in inbound marketing for investors and agents. In addition, his true passion is helping entrepreneurs grow businesses that truly help you live a life of purpose.

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16 responses to “How Many Websites Are Ideal For A Real Estate Wholesaler or Flipper?

  1. Wow this makes at lot of sense. I did the website cram thing for a year and received absolutely zero form submissions from motivated sellers. I also believe now that I was actually teaching my buyers how to market for motivated sellers themselves. Thanks Trevor you Rock!

    1. Yep! Great point.

      Sometimes the difference between results and loss… or average results and amazing results are those seemingly “little” strategy tweaks that most investors don’t even notice. We’ve been doing this for so long and have helped our members generate so many leads (over 200,000 last year alone) that we see a lot of those little things that all add up to big differences in results… then we add them to our website platform. It kind of creates an unfair advantage for our members vs. those who don’t use Carrot. Pretty fun stuff! You’ll have to send us through your new site once you get it “uncluttered!”.

  2. If I have a motivated seller website, and a company website, should I direct all my SEO efforts to the motivated seller site? And use the company website just for credibility purposes?

    1. It really depends on what your biggest need at the moment is in your business. If you need seller leads more than buyers than I would shift focus there for sure. The main company credibility site is credibility but also it’s the thing that explains all that you do. It’s usually what you would put on your business card at a networking meeting or something like that… or give to potential private lenders. Again, you don’t need all of these sites… we just suggest having a standalone motivated seller website… then from there decide what makes sense to have on it’s own site or not. Cash buyers and main credibility site can be combined into one well.

    1. Hey Michael! Thanks for the comment man!

      What have you had a chance to implement so far to drive traffic?

      Have you gone through the Carrot Guide in the help center (Phase 2 on short-term traffic in particular) or the 3 Lead Per Day Training?

      Let me know what you’ve had a chance to implement then that’ll give me a good idea on what we can guide you to next.

      And as always, this is the perfect question to ask on our weekly LIVE Carrot Mastermind calls… where we’re on there fielding questions like this and will create a real plan for you to implement (all included in our Content Pro plans).

      We’re here for ya man!

  3. I love the Motivated Seller Site you took a screen shot of, classy act that “CashPDX.com” site! lol

    You rock my friend! I just wish I could make the time to focus more on my online marketing…..

  4. okay so im my company/ cash buyers site is the main one would the motivated seller webitesite be a subdomain of the mainsite?

    1. Hey Laci! Great question.

      So you *could* do it that way for sure. That would solve the problem of mixing the content for sellers and buyers on the same page.

      But then it complicates the URL a bit. It’s not a huge deal on the SEO side… because you’d just build your SEO for the seller site to that subdomain. But if you plan on using the subdomain in your other marketing… postcards, letters, banditsigns, etc. etc… just make sure the URL doesn’t get to large and that the main URL you have relates to how you can help sellers.

      As an example… if you had a domain that was: sell.phoenixinvestmentproperties.com … that’s a rather long domain and the primary part of that domain talks about investment properties… which isn’t in line with what the seller needs. They could think it means it’s for selling investment properties.

      But if you had a domain like… ” sell.abchomebuyers.com ” that would work.

      What’s your primary domain?

      – Trevor

    1. Hey Cory! Great question.

      Again, it really depends on your strategy.

      Some of the largest home buyers in the country use just 1 website to generate leads all over the country… and actually it’s more powerful to do all of your same type lead gen through the same website.

      What I mean is… if you’re looking to generate motivated seller leads… use just 1 website. But then create city / area specific pages on that website for each location you can help people in.

      Look at Loopnet.com as an example… you search “investment properties in [insert any city]” and you’ll see loopnet as one of the top results almost everytime… but it’s always a page specific to that area… not their home page. So they have literally tens of thousands of pages on their site… each focused on a very specific city / area. We do the same thing w/ Carrot and help investors do the same.

      So again… going back to what I mention in the article… first determine the type of leads you’re looking to get… if it’s sellers… that should be on a site away from cash buyers,lenders, etc. Then from there, you can make that site serve Alberta CAN and Phoenix and Austin TX… you’d just create pages on the site that are dedicated for them and the home page you’d make generic so it doesn’t exclude any markets.

      We make it very easy at Carrot to do all of this and can help w/ the strategy and setup even. Just reach out!

  5. if I have build multiple websites for my busines,should i have multiple contact numbers also,multiple email and multiple busines cards?
    thanks

    1. Hey Rena! Great question.

      Real estate agents are slightly different than the investor. I’d honestly likely have 1 website as an agent… unless you have a distinctive separate service that you want to market and brand. i.e. – if you had a construction division or something… that should have it’s own site.

      But keep it as simple as possible while optimizing for performance.

      We’re rolling out AgentCarrot very very soon and we’re focusing on 1 site for the agent… then as we go we’ll develop property specific sites that you can use in your marketing. Those are 2017 roll outs. Keep an eye peeled this year.

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