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Today is a pretty big deal. Why you ask? Because we just rolled out 3 major updates to the InvestorCarrot platform (Carrot V2) that are going to make your life easier, more effective, and be an amazing platform to house our future inbound marketing tools and features.

It’s funny how things work out. For the past 6 months we’ve been working on some big projects here at Carrot and several of them just happened to wrap up around the same time. So we decided to do one big release (after a bunch of testing) this morning of those 3 major updates.

More under the radar, we’ve also released dozens of other smaller updates this year and have other big updates rolling out over the next several weeks (like Land Buying / Selling websites, and more).

But let’s dive in to what’s new in your InvestorCarrot account as of today!

NEW: The Carrot Dashboard: The Foundation For The Future

Our vision here at Carrot is to build the single most effective and simple to use tool for high achieving real estate investors (and soon to be agents as well) to attract more high quality prospects online and convert more of them into profitable leads.  With tens of thousands of leads per month being pulled in through our platform by our members every month already, we’re proud as heck of what our members like you have helped us build over the past 2.5 years.

But, to make room for the amazing features and tools we have planned for the rest of 2016 and into 2017, we decided to redesign your user dashboard from the ground up.

Take it for a spin and let us know how you like it.

The biggest changes you’ll see are… 

• More simplified dashboard showing your websites in a more compact space
• We’ve brought many of the settings for your websites out of the confusing WordPress interface and into a simple and intuitive custom dashboard. Want to add tracking codes to your site? Attach a domain? Great, it’s just 2 clicks away now 🙂
• More robust website stats! (more on that below)
• Better organized way to display the different types of websites you can setup in your account
• It looks clean and crisp. Can’t beat that!

You’ll notice more changes too but you’ll have to dig into your new dashboard to discover everything 🙂

Check Out More Of Our Latest Features:

NEW! All Your Leads In One Place, Campaign Tracking, & A New Dashboard View

NEW: Know Your Numbers With Carrot Site Stats

Having quick access to your basic website stats is important to knowing what’s working and what isn’t. So we decided to bring more useful data and fancy graphs right into your dashboard for each website.

This will help you save time from having to learn Google Analytics and it’ll deliver you the essential traffic data that you need on a continual basis. You’ll notice more changes to your stats to come as well so be on the lookout!

Now See Robust Traffic Stats (more to come!)

NEW: Fresh Website Styles Rebuilt From The Ground Up For Desktop And Mobile = Beauty + Performance

At Carrot, all of our website design decisions are based on performance. Will these changes improve the conversion rate and overall ROI for our clients or not?

Over the past year we’ve had countless requests for “new site designs” so you can even better stand out from other’s in your market. After all, you already know that Carrot is the most effective tool for SEO and conversion in the industry (which is why more Carrot websites control more top 5 Google rankings for search phrases that matter than any other REI platform)… but you still want more options to look a bit different.

But because we’re committed to high performance we decided we weren’t going to just roll out some pretty designs and call it a day.

So we embarked on what became a 10 month journey of split testing over 20 designs on over 100 websites to tens of thousands of visitors to find some other “styles” that perform at least as well as our current high performing style you’ve come to recognize and love.

A Screenshot Of Just One Of Our Tests…

And after all of that testing, we found 4 fresh styles that perform up to our standards and give you that design flexibility to look different.

Then we started from scratch and completely rebuilt our entire code base around our websites from the ground up so every part of our websites perform even better on mobile, look more clean, are easier to use, and use our new “Site Customizer” to make editing your appearance settings a breeze.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I know I know, you’ve had a website up with us for a while and you’re chomping at the bit to move over to one of these fresh styles. I would be too. But for now, these fresh styles are available only for new websites launched from today moving forward. We are working on a migration tool to move existing websites over to these fresh site styles for those who want to, but we didn’t want to make you all wait another couple of months to leverage these designs for your NEW sites.

Also, our original site style in use on all existing websites before today is still our highest performing design in aggregate and one we’re not abandoning anytime soon. It’s still a beast. These fresh styles just give some more design options without sacrificing performance because they’re all tested, proven, and built with our Carrot Conversion methodology at the core.

With that said, take a quick peak at our new site styles below. We’ve just used motivated house seller websites for these examples… but these styles can be used on any of our website types on websites launched from today on.

Each style is named after some of our favorite Oregon trees. We love the outdoors and LOVE our home state of Oregon and want to spread some Oregon love.

The Madrone – Clean, Re-Imagined Header, Striking Image

With the Madrone style you’ll really be able to leverage a local image and our eye catching “action bar” at the top of your website. This looks even more amazing on mobile.

The Douglas – Our Original Mainstay Design Modernized For The Future

The Douglas Fir is the most popular tree in our county and the mainstay of our local timber industry. So what better name for the most popular and productive site style in use by Carrot members today. We refreshed the design a bit, added new features such as social media icons as an option in the header, our new site customizer, and more.

The Cedar – Simple And Striking

The Cedar leverages our same proven conversion elements we’ve honed over the years and wraps them around a new visual. You’ll notice the full height hero image, no black box around the call to action text, and transparent header. This style looks amazing on mobile and retains the high performance we demand.

The Juniper – Draws Your Eye Straight To The CTA

If you know anything about Juniper trees is that they suck all of the water out of the ground they are growing in. When we tested this design (we originally called it the “Stacked Hero” internally) we ran the test on 20+ websites all across the country at once… and it consistently sucked more leads out of the web than most everything else we tested. Some markets it converted considerably higher, most it was right on par with our original style, and a couple it was slightly lower. But in aggregate it was our highest performing of the fresh site styles.

So go launch a new website in your Carrot account today and see these fresh site styles in action!

How To Use A New Site Style On A New Website

Just login to your account, launch a new website, then click “Design” in the settings area. Then you can browse the fresh new styles, preview, and activate all in a few seconds.

And as a reminder in case you missed it above, these fresh site styles are currently available for new websites launched from today on forward. Any existing websites we recommend you stay with the original (as it is still our highest performer as far as lead volume goes) until we complete our “Site Migrator” to help those who want a different visual look for their existing sites over to one of the new styles above.

NEW: Simplified Way To Adjust Settings And Branding

One of the biggest pains in the butt when you’re editing the design settings of most websites including Carrot is you couldn’t immediately see how those changes would impact the look of your website without saving them… and going to your actual URL and refreshing your website. Pain right?

Well we’ve solved that with our new robust Website Customizer.

We’ve consolidated many of the most important settings in the Customizer and also added some amazing new features to get you from “idea” to “launch” more quickly with less headache. 

Some of the biggest changes in the customizer are…

• Preview your design changes in real time right in your account
• Build a professional and clean logo in the app if you don’t already have one
• More easily and quickly brand your site (no coding required)
• Adjust your navigation menus and sidebar content right there too!
• … and other new features (go explore and find ’em 🙂

Now Preview Your Design Changes In Real-Time!

Quick And Simple Logo Builder + Brand Center

Innovating For Your Future

Behind the scenes we’re working our butts off to keep you at the cutting edge as far as inbound marketing goes for your real estate investing business.

Mobile

We continue to focus a ton of energy and resources on innovations on mobile design and performance. Be on the lookout for even more improvements in the coming months to keep you ahead of the mobile curve.

Performance

Performance and ROI are at the heart of why so many people are switching to Carrot and getting better results from Carrot than any other platform they’ve tried (even their custom websites). We’re currently testing tools that we plan on launching as “apps” within your Carrot account to help you squeeze out more gains on your websites… including our “Campaign Tracker” and more robust lead manager that are next on our development timeline.

SEO

The Carrot community holds more top rankings than any other website platform for investors, but we want to build out a full “front to back” inbound online marketing tool to help you identify good keywords to target, track the ranking of those keywords, tracking your competitors, and more.

Support

Often times the “unsexy” part of why our customers succeed is our support structure. Our team here at Carrot, Mastermind calls, and trainings. So we’re investing even more into that team this summer and into new services and trainings that we’ll make available only to Carrot members.

In the end, if you LOVE Carrot now, you’re going to really love it each and every month as our product vision unfolds.

Hit me with your thoughts on some of these features below in the comments section and go out there and crush it with these new features!

“We’re excited to announce the newest addition to our family of tools! These tools help real estate investors simplify not only their job but also what is required of a potential lead. We also addressed the need for land investor by building an engaging land investor website platform.

When we blog and talk about our tools and systems, and the community remind us that staying ahead of the curve is extremely important.

Well, we took a look at the feedback and set out to create additional tools that help real estate investors optimize their efforts. Now, after lots of hard work, we’re ready to roll back the curtain on our latest offering:

New Auto-Complete Address Form Field

Fewer fields = higher conversion rate. This is especially important on mobile devices.  With this idea in mind, we now have a way to get a complete and valid address from visitors using a single field!

Using Google Maps auto-complete suggestions, as visitors start typing in the address field, matching addresses will be suggested based on their location. In our tests, this can save a ton of time and hopefully increase conversion rates over requiring a visitor to manually type in their whole address.

Use this Auto-Complete Address Field Tutorial to tackle the process.

Automatic Image Optimization

Carrot rolled out our new image optimization feature! Now when images are uploaded to Carrot sites, they are:

1 – resized to a maximum of 1920px wide and 1200px tall
2 – given a lossy compression of 85%
3 – run through a lossless compression

This is a big benefit because it takes the manual step we used to put on customers of reducing the image size before uploading, helps make their sites faster, and should reduce support load due to it being a lot harder to fill up their storage space (which we may now bump up by default).

This only applies to new images that are uploaded from now forward, so give it a try and let us know if anything looks wonky.

New Narrow Landing Page Template

Addressing a request, we have added a new landing page template that is a simple, narrow centered form. This form is centered vertically and horizontally, so it plays well with a lot of different full-screen background images.

Our demo example: see the full narrow landing page image here.

Another example with a background image and copy: see the full narrow landing page with background image here.

New Land Investor Websites

Over a couple month period, we researched and tested websites in the land buyer market to create our first version of a good performing rent to own website that you as our InvestorCarrot members can access and setup in your accounts.

Return Access To Bypass Forms

Carrot forms have a feature to let your site visitors bypass a Landing Page, or Page if they have already completed the form. This is useful for requiring an opt-in to see a specific page or other content on your website. Dive into the return access to bypass forms tutorial.

Time To Test Drive

Enough of the talking, now it’s time for you to dive in and see for yourself. With Carrot, we’re providing an exceptional service and always evolving real estate platform. Just head over to our demo and take it for a spin.

If you’re ready to grow, you can always join on a monthly or annual plan.

Wow, 2015 flew by.

It’s amazing how fast the years go by… yet how much you can accomplish in those 12 months when you get clear, get focused on your “big pumpkins” and have a mission that means something to you and your customers a core level.

I thought it would be pretty cool to do a quick review of some of the cool things that both YOU… our Carrot community… and us… Carrot the company were able to accomplish together this year.

All in all, 2015 was a banner year for our Carrot members and an amazing year of growth for our team and company because we focused so much on the one thing that matters… helping YOU get what you want out of life more easily and more effectively with our tools, software, training, and support.

So what happened in 2015?

Let’s dive into some cool stuff in this quick post!

Carrot Members Are Crushing It With Leads!

You guys were a force to be reckoned with in 2015. With over 20,000 leads per month coming in (when you count phone call leads… which we can’t track in Google Analytics currently) you’re pulling in more PPC, SEO, and social media online leads as a collective group than any other real estate investor lead generation platform… by far. Keep crushing it! We’ll help you get there. 

375 “Doses Of Awesomeness” Sent In!

At Carrot, hearing back from our clients is like fuel for us. So much so that we created an internal tool for our team members called the “Thread of Awesomeness” where our team members add the great things that Carrot clients send in to us on a daily basis. Here is a very small snapshot of some of the messages Carrot clients have sent us recently. 

Over 6,600 Live Chats + 17,215 Help Tickets Solved!

You guys were busy! And so were we! Our team helped our Carrot members through the tough spots in 2015 in a big way. We process hundreds of tickets and live chats per week and we’re humbled by the ratings you gave our team during your interactions with us.

We work our butts off so you can spend less time working with our software and more time closing deals. Soon you’ll be introduced to our newest addition to the Carrot Customer Success team in January… keep an eye out! 

We LOVE Chatting With Our Customers. Keep It Coming In 2016!

Or, Send Us An Email And Our Customer Success Team Will Dominate That Too! 🙂

Never Stop Improving

Another Core Value of ours is “constant never-ending improvement“… and both our customers and us as a company sure did live that one. In addition to the dozens of features we released in 2016 to help our clients spend less time hassling with tech and marketing issues and to pull in more leads… and dozens of split tests we ran on sites to increase the conversion rates of your websites (to much higher than the industry average)… our members relentlessly showed up to our weekly LIVE Coaching Calls, asked us questions, and helped us find the best ways to help you improve. Keep it up in 2016! We have some amazing new features and additions coming your way! 

We Helped Your Conversion Rates Improve Even More In 2015!

There are some really cool innovations coming out in Q1 of 2016 based on our continual conversion rate optimization team. It’s this dedication to performance and ROI that has helped you pull in so many leads in 2016 (especially on mobile devices!)

46 LIVE Coaching Calls In The Books

(Content Pro Members)

We LOVE Making Business Fun

(So much so, it’s one of our Core Values)

In 2015 we mailed out over 721 Carrot Bud dolls to Carrot members. That’s a LOT of Carrot love. And we just ordered another thousand for 2016 (with 2 new designs that you’ll love!). If you’re a Carrot member keep an eye out for special surprises from us. You never know… you may be the next to get your very own Carrot Bud in the mail in 2016.

721 Carrot Clients Received A Carrot Bud In The Mail In 2015

1 Carrot Customer Sent In A Carrot Bud Unboxing Video (haha, gotta love that!)

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Plus Tons Of Amazing Smiling Faces With Their Carrot Buds!

Our Team Has Grown In More Ways Than One

InvestorCarrot started out as a one-man show 3 years ago… then we quickly added our CTO, built out the Customer Success team, and the rest is history. Now the team is continually growing to stay ahead of the curve so our members can also stay ahead of the curve from their competition. We’re proud to be adding several more full-time team members to the Carrot team in early 2016 as well! Keep an eye out! 

8 Scotch Eggs Consumed (give or take a few)

Thanks, O’Tooles for making the best damn Scotch Egg in the land.

Countless Pints Of Beer Down The Hatch

… and much more fun, challenging, and rewarding ways our team grew in size, skill, and in our relationships together.

All In All, An Amazing Year You’ve Made It Carroteers!

With 2016 a blink away, make sure to use this time to look back on your own 2015. Reflect on the great strides you’ve taken toward your dreams and goals… and reflect on the things you still need to improve on and tackle with focus and intentionality in 2016.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out these 2 posts we published the past 2 weeks (both were our most actively shared and commented on content pieces in 2015 too!)… dive into them. They’ll help you make some important mindset shifts for 2016 and we walk you through how to make 2016 an epic year.

Even better than 2015. 

First, read this blog post:

How A Pumpkin Farmer Changed My Perspective On Life And Business

(the most commented on post of the year!)

Next, carve out an afternoon and plan out your 2016 with this training:

Planning Out An Epic 2016: Our 7 Figure Process

(the most amazing and life-changing Coaching Calls of the year)

Here’s to a great year, lots of successes, lots of lessons and stumbling blocks, but in the end…

… we’re all alive, having fun, building our own lives and making a difference… together… as the Carrot Community.

Thank you for all you do and for inspiring us every day to do great things.

Chat with you in 2016!

We don’t do this very often, but we want to get better at it! This post is just about some of the powerful new features we have launched for Carrot customers over the last month.

Referral & Lead Source Tracking

Have you ever got a lead and wondered how they landed on your site? Was it SEO? Was it a PPC campaign? Did it come from Facebook?  Well now you’ll know where all of your leads came from. 

With our new “Lead Source Tracking” feature you’ll see where every lead came from in an instant.

You have always had access to some of this data if you were a Google Analytics wizard, but now every lead that comes through your site says where the they came from – helping you see how your marketing is going, and how people are finding you online.

Simple Display in Your Lead List

Want to see your lead’s source right there with your other form data? Just click the gear icon, on the Forms >> Entries page… add the column to your active list for that form, and you’re all set!

Full UTM Link Support – ADVANCED FEATURE

If you are not already using UTM style tracking links for your marketing efforts, start now if you’re already generating a good amount of leads and traffic. A lot of email marketing tools like MailChimp have this built in, and anywhere else you put up a link to your site, you can build your own links that show you how your visitors are getting to your site, and ultimately: how effective each of your marketing methods are.

UTM tracking links are standard for Google Analytics, and now every lead in your carrot account is compatible with these links as well. So if you set up a code that includes even more specific data about the campaign, that will be saved to your lead and you can review that for each entry.

Again, this is an advanced feature, so if you’re just getting started you can ignore this one 🙂

Email Notification Support

You can even add the lead source to your notification email to see the source as soon as the lead comes in. Just edit your admin notification email, and choose “{leadsource}” from the dropdown to add it so you can see right there in your email inbox where that lead came from.

Page URL in Admin Lead Notifications

This is a question we got a lot – “I have more than one site, and when I get lead notifications, how do I know which site it came from?”

Well, now all admin notifications that include the full entry details also contain a link to the page the form was submitted on… so you’re never guessing which of your websites the lead came from. Easy peasy.

Short Codes in Lead Form Titles/Descriptions

This is a simple, but powerful new feature – use your “Company Info” shortcodes right inside of form titles and descriptions. New Carrot sites take advantage of this new feature out of the box from now on to help further customize your website content automatically, and existing customers can add those shortcodes into any of your existing forms as needed!

Company Info in Lead Form Notification Emails

Another simple new feature that makes your email notifications to new leads more personalized and credible right out of the box (on new sites). Have Carrot sites created already? Just edit up your form notifications and check out the new “Company Info” options when add in merge codes.

Get Response Integration

Here’s another often-requested integration checked off the list! Now send your new leads directly into your marketing funnel with our native GetResponse.com integration for your forms. GetResponse is an email marketing software that a lot of investors use, so now you can integrate your Carrot forms directly with your GetResponse lists!

Be On The Lookout For Some Amazing Updates In August!

I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag right now but we have some big updates we’re working on for August that’ll help make your life easier in many ways. You’ll have a clearer plan of action to see success with your online marketing, you’ll see some visual updates on the way your Carrot sites look,  and much much more!

Let us know in the comments box below what features you’d love to see on InvestorCarrot!

Over the year and a half since InvestorCarrot was born, we’ve had a lot of improvements, upgrades, and new features.

Heck in the past 4 months alone we’ve launched hundreds of improvements to make it even easier and faster to launch effective online lead generation websites as a real estate investor, beef up the level of support members get even further than it already is, get your leads faster (sms alerts), make your websites rank better in Google, and convert leads at an even higher rate.

But all of that pales in comparison to what we have in store for InvestorCarrot members over the next 4 months 🙂

Today we’re happy as heck to roll out the first version of our Carrot Marketplace to the InvestorCarrot community.

What Is The InvestorCarrot Marketplace And How Does It Help Make Your Life Easier?

As a real estate investor, when getting real estate investing leads online… launching an effective website is just the first step.

We already make that crazy easy. <== See a video of the process there

But if you’re wanting to drive a lot of traffic to your websites (motivated sellers, cash buyers, private lenders, rent to own tenants, note sellers, etc.) you or someone has to roll up their sleeves to get to work.

InvestorCarrot gives you a huge jumpstart with our real estate investing websites to rank better in Google and convert your leads much higher than the industry average… and our support is what we’ve been told time and time again is the best in the industry by far.

So now with our new Carrot Marketplace, we’re making it as easy as buying milk (or carrots 🙂 at the grocery store to find the vendors, services, and help so you can ramp up your results even faster.

What Will You As An InvestorCarrot Customer Find In The NEW Carrot Marketplace?

Log into your Carrot account and click the NEW Marketplace tab to check it out for yourself.

But here’s a quick snapshot of what you’ll find in there right now… and what we have in store for the marketplace in 2015.

In this first rollout of the marketplace we’re making it easier for you to get access to the services we’ve already been helping you with and offering for months and months… this just streamlines the process and puts the powerfully into your hands.

Online Marketing & Lead Generation Strategy Help And Services

Everyday InvestorCarrot customers reach out to us looking for help with their real estate investing PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to help ramp up the traffic and leads. If you’re in a more competitive market (a town over… say 50,000 people)… you’ll likely have to focus some time implementing our 3 Lead Per Day Training to move up the rankings in Google.

Carrot gives you a head start, implementing the steps in the 3 Lead Per Day Training give it a boost.

So you’ll now be able to connect directly with vetted and Certified Carrot Partners who can do the SEO and PPC work for you if you’d rather just have someone else do it.

These same vendors have been working with InvestorCarrot members for over a year and pulled some pretty amazing results in the process (top Google rankings in markets all across the country and consistent leads each and every day)

Help Customizing And Optimizing Your Websites

We’re always focusing on making InvestorCarrot even easier to get highly effective websites up for your real estate investing business quickly… whether you’re a techie or not.

But, if you’d rather have us do the branding for you… and build out your city-specific pages for you… and help build your personal credibility into your websites for you so you don’t have to lift a finger, that’s where this section comes in.

Access our QuickStart service where we ask you 13 simple questions, and our team gets to work customizing your websites to fit your business, branding, and goals.

Plus have our team help you capture more traffic with city-specific / local pages and more!

These are all things you can easily do for yourself inside your InvestorCarrot account… but if you’d rather focus on what you do best and have us do it for you, we’ve got you covered.

Premium Training

Our members are generating well over 10,000 opt-in leads per month right now (that doesn’t count phone call leads)… and a huge part of it is the combination of the effectiveness of our website platform and the training you can access as an InvestorCarrot member.

Right now you’ll find our Posts 2 Profits Craigslist training and our 3 Lead Per Day (SEO, PPC, Youtube marketing course) in the Carrot Marketplace.

But we plan on launching more Premium Trainings in 2015 (in addition to our weekly LIVE Carrot Coaching Calls FREE to Content Pro members) to help you market effectively on Facebook, use Retargeting to “fetch back” more leads, and more! So keep an eye out for new Premium Trainings.

Get InvestorCarrot Swag

Why have a company name like Carrot if you’re not going to have fun with it and be loud and proud about it?  Right? 🙂

Well, now you can get Carrot Swag right in the marketplace.

Want a t-shirt (American Apparel – Made in the USA)? Grab one.

How about some awesome note pads with our Core Values on them… grab those in our “Carrot Swag Bag” which includes a t-shirt, a NEW Carrot Bud doll, Carrot stickers, and our awesome Carrot Idea Pads.

What’s In Store For 2015 With The Carrot Marketplace?

We’re working furiously on developing new features into the software to solidify our place as the leading Inbound Online Marketing platform for Real Estate Investors… which we’ll release to members as we finish them up.

But, we’ve realized that some features don’t make sense to build into every website that is launched. Things like an advanced BirdDog Referral Program system to help you generate bird dogs to find you more deals. Or “built for you” Podio apps to help you better manage your lead flow. Or marketing campaigns that are crushing it for people. Or 1 on 1 strategy consulting with me and our top performing Carrot members to help you bust past your roadblocks and excel… you get the idea.

So be on the lookout for other resources, tools, and website add-ons so you can further leverage InvestorCarrot to reach your goals.

And heck, if you have ideas for great resources, tools, and new functionality for your InvestorCarrot websites please shoot them our way!

Be on the lookout for more announcements about new features and enhancements over the next several months. We’ve got some in store that we know you’re going to LOVE.

Sound Off Below About The New Marketplace!

Hit me w/ comments and questions below… or if you’re not an InvestorCarrot member yet but are considering it, throw your questions my way! We’re here for you and would love for you to be a part of the success that our members are having (10k+ leads per month and growing!).

I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing… but it’s been insane how darn fast 2014 flew by. It seems like just last week I was sitting at a local coffee shop I like to hang out at on “non office days” writing up my 2014 goals… and getting with our team and jotting down how we’d rule the world in 2014.

And the funny / scary thing is… the years only get faster.

Before we know it we’ll be looking back on 2015 reviewing how the year went… and asking ourselves if we did what we wanted to do the previous 12 months.

That to me is a huge motivator. Knowing that time is going to pass whether I get focused, excited, and make stuff happen or not. So we might as well give it all we’ve got… ignore the naysayers… and crush it in life and business.

So… with the end of our first full year in business here at InvestorCarrot… providing what high achieving real estate investors all over the country are calling “the best real estate investor websites I’ve seen” again and again (we’re attracting more top notch investors in each market than any other website system for real estate investors)… I want to dive into some of the things the InvestorCarrot community was able to achieve in 2014… some of our biggest wins and failures as a young company… and what you’re in store for in 2015 as an InvestorCarrot community member (whether you’re an active customer of ours or not… you’ll benefit BIG TIME in 2015).

7 Things We’re Insanely Proud Of For 2014

2014 was a great year for us as a company and for our customers… here’s 7 things we’re proud as heck of for 2014.

1. Tons Of Customer Love And RESULTS (Leads and Deals) In Our Thread Of Awesomeness

Around the start of 2014 we started something we call the “Thread of Awesomeness” here at InvestorCarrot as an internal team tool to help us all keep our eye on why we do what we do. Each week… when any member of our team interacts with a customer who has an AWESOME result or experience… we throw it into this chat thread that we use internally as a team… called The Thread of Awesomeness.

I wish I could show you all of the hundreds of awesome comments customers sent us in 2014 (we averaged 7 per week!)… but this snapshot below from just 1 week in December is a pretty good representation of the types of “AWESOMENESS” happening for our Carrot members using our system.

That stuff keeps us motivated to do what we do… and our team

2. Nearly 500% Increase In Traffic and Leads For Our Customers!

This kind of speaks for itself. Almost a 500% increase in traffic to our customers websites.

A few cool stats for the year…

• 2,052,930 page views
• 656,736 visitors
• Nearly 1 million visits
• An average visit time of almost 2 and a half minutes (average… our most successful members are seeing a time on site of over 3 minutes!)
• And this winter our customers generated nearly 10,000 leads per month to their websites (and growing)

3. Spreading Carrot Delight To Our Customers With Crazy Great Support!

One thing I said I wouldn’t compromise going into launching InvestorCarrot was on support. In fact… “delivering wow” to our customers is one of our Carrot Core Values (which we both live by and work by). To us here at InvestorCarrot great customer experiences is a heck of a lot more fun than crappy customer experiences. It makes it fun coming into work when the customers you work with really like ya.

Customers can rate their experience with us when they connect with us through support and over this past 12 months 90% of our customers rated us as having GREAT service, 8% rated our support Okay and 2% poor (can’t make everyone happy eh :-)… that’s on 3,233 tickets we resolved for our customers in 2014! 

Another cool metric we’re proud as heck of… that 98% of InvestorCarrot member support requests were replied to within 24 hours… 89% in under 6 hours… and most in under 1 hour during work hours! Try us and see 🙂 

4. Our Carrot Team Grew Stronger

Going into 2014 we had a full-time team of 5. With a couple team adjustments and shifts over 2014… we re-focused on the core of what we’re great at… and brought aboard a kick butt new team member in November… and strengthened our relationships with a few key partners to help in areas where we’re not ready to build in-house teams quite yet.

5. Releasing Dozens And Dozens Of Software Updates, Trainings, And Complete New Features
(like sms alerts and more!)

During 2014 we held 50+ LIVE weekly Carrot Coaching Calls (which are included in all Content Pro plans at no additional cost), simplified the software over the way it was to end 2013, added additional features like sms / text message lead alerts, more integrations like Zapier, simplified YouTube video embeds, Content Pro content marketing system, and more!

We’re releasing updates to the software on an almost daily basis… and plan to ramp that effort up in 2015 to really focus on a few big game changers for our customers to help you generate more traffic and leads. Keep an eye out 🙂

6. Restarting Our Carrot Blog With Great, Useful Content To Help You Grow

In November we launched the new design of this blog and renewed our commitment to bringing you behind the scenes content that will help you move the needle in your business each week to generate more leads, rank your websites better, increase your website conversion, and improve your happiness as an entreprenuer.

Keep an eye out for our weekly posts in your inbox and join in the conversation each week!

In fact, what do you want us to write about more in 2015? Let me know in the comments below 🙂

7. Growing A Profitable, Fun, And Effective Business Starting With Just Our Sweat, Focus, And Hard Work

Too many companies try to hide the “sensitive” parts of their business from their customers… like revenues and profits… but really there’s no need to hide your successes or failures from your clients.

In fact, by growing a profitable company it’s actually a great thing for customers. That means more cash for innovation, more cash for building an even stronger support team (which we’re looking to hire another Customer Success Hero in early 2015!), more cash to move faster to keep YOU… our customers ahead of the curve from your competition.

So we’re proud as heck that we’ve grown a company this past year and a half that is very profitable, without outside funding, with a small team 100% based here in Oregon, that is doing great things for (and with) our customers. Without this big win… the other “wins” above honestly wouldn’t matter… and we’ll continue to grow and manage this company to ensure stability and innovation for our customers and our own families in 2015 and beyond.

3 Biggest “Failures” And How We’ll Improve Them In 2015

With the great year we had… also came some bumps and bruises that we survived. Most of them were self inflicted and totally avoidable… but lessons we had to learn in order to grow stronger to the point we are today.

1. Losing Focus Of Who Our Core Customer Is

This is a biggie. At times during the year we lost our way and created things in our software and marketing efforts that focused on the wrong customer. Our ideal customer is a high achieving investor. Someone who is motivated, who isn’t using real estate as a new business “opportunity”… but rather a serious career, and who is ready and willing to invest time, money, or both to accelerate their results online.

You’ll see a tighter focus on this type of person in 2015 which will dramatically improve your results.

2. Not Building The Business WE Wanted To Build

It’s really easy to listen to outsiders and let their opinions influence the way you live life and grow your real estate investing business. We did that a bit too much at times this past year as well… growing InvestorCarrot at times in directions that really didn’t resonate with me at my core on the reason we created this company in the first place.

Now with a renewed focus on our vision, why we exist as a company, our ideal customer that we can help the most, and the life we want to live… we’re already on an exciting and more focused track to crushing it in 2015… the way WE WANT TO DO IT.

3. Lack Of Organization And Focus At Times Led Us In Wrong Directions

This one is honestly directed mainly at me as the CEO of the company.

This has always been a weakness of mine and something I’m continually working to improve. me personally… not being as organized as the leader of the company as I need to be. Which led to things like announcing releases in the software and training and not hitting many of the dates I put out there, etc.

So the last 2 months I’ve personally had to make a renewed commitment to being more organized. My team has helped with this a lot and we’re now relying better on systems to track our projects, communicate better as a team, and be more focused and clear on our goals and objectives each month and week.

I’ll write a post in 2015 walking through what we’ve done to really start the transformation to working more focused, organized, and be less busy on a daily basis.

Some Things To Expect From InvestorCarrot In 2015

As great of a year it was in 2014… it won’t compare to the year we have planned out for 2015.

Yes, we’ll be continuing to build out the best inbound online marketing platform for real estate investors with additions to help you rank your websites better and easier, track your rankings instantly, increase the conversions on your websites even further, get more leads, manage those leads more easily with systems (like Podio, coming soon), and more!

But what we’re going to really focus on in 2015 is not just features… but finding better ways to help you get personalized guidance to get you the results you want in your business and your life.

This includes…

1. Our New Marketplace – Soon you’ll be able more easily find the tools, resources, training, and help to get you even better results. Look out for this in January 2015
2. More Industry Best Training Opportunities– Our Carrot members have come to know and love our weekly LIVE Coaching Calls with me and our other team members… but we want to spread the love in 2015. Starting in January everyone in our Carrot community can come to a new monthly training call open to all subscribers to our email list.
3. More Personal Guidance – Our customers have asked, and we’re making it easier for you to get more personalized help as you need it as a Carrot member. This means more ways to connect with people who can help you implement your SEO, PPC, and lead gen strategy… more ways to get tailored action plans to what you need to do to get results in your market.
4. Honing Our Inbound Lead Generation Tools Within Carrot – We’re proud of what InvestorCarrot has grown to become. But we have a greater vision for how we can make your life easier and more profitable in 2015 with better tools to help you rank your website, generate more leads more easily, and spend less time customizing things on your websites… and more time doing what you love to do.

We’re really excited about 2015 and are thankful for a great community of investors who are really supporting what we’re doing here at InvestorCarrot to help transform the way high achieving real estate investors use the internet to grow their real estate business.

How Was Your 2014 And Where Do You Want To Improve In 2015?
Let’s continue the convo in the comments below!