In this episode Kris Reid the founder of Ardor SEO talks about the importance of backlinks and lead magnets and how to use them to benefit your real estate website. Kris provides tips on how to rank higher in Google using high quality content. Next, Kris talks about Ardor SEO and what services they provide for the real estate professionals. Last, Kris talks about the Real Estate Masters Summit and gives a presentation of the speakers and what’s going to be presented there in 7 days.
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If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!
Kris Reid can be reached at +1 323-457-4087 and info@ardorseo.com.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by the real estate masters virtual summit. The real estate masters virtual Summit is the biggest real estate event of the year 42 superstar speaker presentations, and live q&a sessions over seven action packed days starting June 1. The best part is that it’s 100% Free for all listeners of keeping it real podcast. Join the event for access to exclusive content from the comfort of your own home do not miss out seating is extremely limited. So sign up today. Again, it’s seven days of completely free training from dozens of industry experts, visit real estate masters summit.com right now and sign up again real estate masters summit.com. And now onto the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide, and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Kris Reid, of the real estate masters Summit, which all of you should go sign up for right now. But before we get to Kris and the great conversation, we just add, I want to remind everyone that we are so thankful that you are a listener and supporter of this show, we are working on some big additions to the show that we’ll be announcing shortly. So stay tuned for that. And also, as we continue to grow, we always ask you to help us and we really only need you to do one thing, which is tell a friend think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing from top producers about how to grow their business to become a top one percenter and send them a link to the show you can always send them right to our website keeping it real pod.com And also, please follow us on Facebook we are@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod we post every episode we’ve ever done. And while we’re recording our episodes, we actually stream them live right there on our Facebook page so that way you don’t have to wait for us to produce them you can watch them as we’re recording and see all of our screw ups along the way too. So again, follow it find us on Facebook facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our interview with Kris Reid.
All right, today on the show we have Kris Reid from Ardor SEO. Now originally from Brisbane, Australia. Kris studied software engineering in the Queensland University at Queensland University of Technology. Pretty much as soon as he graduated, he moved to London to work in finance. When the financial crisis hit Kris lost his job is nearly everyone in finance did and he headed back to Australia with his tail between his legs. But Kris has always built desktop applications. So he wanted to learn web programming, and he decided to build a simple online game called mob warrior. As the game came to fruition, he thought How do I get people to the website to play the game? Pretty important question right? Well, Kris started to learn about search engine optimization otherwise known as SEO and then this marked the inception of what would become ardor SEO. Now our guest developed a simple system to get your message in front of your ideal customer to predictably grow your business. And that’s exactly the system he is going to share with us today. Kris has designed and implemented the simple system for many individuals including Avery Carl who was one of the top 100 Realtors the United States. Now this proven system is repeatable for any business and in any industry. And the best part is that our guest is so confident in his system that he guarantees successful results. Now Kris will also be talking about our the upcoming real estate master summit which we are promoting heavily and how the audience can get involved and benefit from this event. Now let’s welcome our guests coming all the way from Saigon, Vietnam, Mr. Kris Reid from Ardor SEO welcome, Kris.
Kris Reid 4:12
What an introduction Chad thank you so much.
D.J. Paris 4:15
We’re super excited to have you We should also mention before we get started that everyone should be signing up for the real estate masters Summit. So everyone who is not driving a car at this moment or if you’re driving a car, please pull over and visit real estate masters summit.com again real estate masters summit.com and sign up there’s I think 42 speakers Kris being one of them to teach you everything you need to know about how to be a successful real estate agent or if you’re already successful, how to get to the next level and also visit Kris’s company, ardor seo.com For all your SEO needs. But Kris, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Kris Reid 4:52
Just as you mentioned that I like Avery Carl she is amazing. I absolutely love working with her. She is one of our clients and She’s speaking at the summit. And if you’re a realtor, she’s a woman to follow. She is a gun. Not only did she have a have a baby last year, she 300% grew her business, just just to an email that was a person that was looking to work with us. Avery sent an email to them recently. And I’ll just read out the one line she wrote. She said, I told her I sold 56 million in real estate in 2019. And I sold 158 million in 2020. Wow, amazing you guys and hiring more agents to help with the volume are the only two things I did different. I mean, like what a testimonial. And Avery is speaking at the summit, and she’s it’s not like a podcast, she’s doing a presentation she’s showing you exactly how she smashed her business growth whilst taking more time off to be with her baby. So man, if you want to be like heading towards she’s she’s on track to be one of the top 10 realtors in the US.
D.J. Paris 5:55
You know, it’s really funny, really funny that you mentioned her name because out of nowhere about three or four weeks ago, what her publicist or whoever is booking a podcast for reached out to us for Avery and we I think we ever booked on a future episode. So we’re super excited to to speak to her just coincidentally, and we’re speaking with you and helped fuel her success. So this is a nice coincidence. And I always like to to meet the team even behind you know, the face. And Avery of course, is a huge success and so is so are you as well as our SEO. So tell us a little bit about how you got into the SEO game and and what that means for realtors.
Kris Reid 6:35
Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, I worked in finance as a software engineer. I was living high on the hog figured my ego as big as the sun love and life up until the 2008 global financial crisis came in took my job way. life sucked. I know, I’d been living in London enjoying Europe with lots of Pound sterling to enjoy my time. I had to lick my wounds head back to Australia, and what the hell am I gonna do with my life. And there was no jobs to be had, especially in finance. So there’s no way I could make the same sort of money I was making. And being a computer geek, I built an online game, not particularly to be a businessman, I knew nothing about business. Just just geek it out. And then as a well, how do you get people to a website to play the damn thing? I started studying about SEO, search engine optimization, how to get people to your website from Google. I’ve discovered the secret of how Google works, which is backlinks build a bunch of backlinks to my website, it’s shut up in the rankings. I got heaps of traffic and I went wow, this is super cool. And super valuable. And I’ve been doing it ever since.
D.J. Paris 7:41
Well, it’s funny, I will tell you in a past life, one of my sort of just side creative gigs was to have a humor blog. And so I’ve been writing that for for many, many years. And it was somewhat popular. And what happened. So what Kris is talking about backlinks and so backlinks, what they are is when other websites link to your website through a hyperlink, right? So somebody might be writing an article on their blog saying, hey, you know, DJ just wrote this really funny article, or maybe it’s a real estate related thing and saying, Hey, you should check that out. And so they’re, they’re gonna link back to your site. And then the search engines like Google, of course, take note, and they follow those links. And they say, okay, you know it. First of all, when they want to look at the originating website that’s linking to your website, is it an authoritative site? Is it something where Google says, hey, you know, if cnn.com, or any of the major news sites link to my blog, that’s a pretty big deal. While none of them ever did, but but a lot of other smaller websites did. And so I started getting, you know, I started shooting up the rankings for terms that I didn’t even anticipate to, you know, to rank for. And at one point, I was ranking for the, the word best blog, and I was number one, above. And Kris, we lost Kris for a second. What I was telling Kris is, I got so many backlinks. And for my blog at the time, this is 10 years ago or so. And I was actually ranking number two for the term and just imagine the traffic for the term best blog. I was number two, I was behind Time Magazine’s 20 best blogs of whatever year that was, and somehow my this is before Google kind of tightened up their policies, and realized that maybe my silly little humor website shouldn’t really be the second result for best blogs. But what I will tell you is being that I did have a number of backlinks to get me there. What it did is it exploded my traffic organically. What we’re talking about is when people search on Google, obviously being in those first two or three positions, really is going to generate, you know, the vast majority of those clicks. So what Kris is talking about is how do we get people to of course, rank at that level, which is very, very difficult and usually, you know, requires a tremendous amount of effort.
Kris Reid 10:01
Can we can we take it back a step DJ, because most people really don’t even understand the purpose of the site. No, web designers don’t understand the purpose of website web designers. They generally do a really bad job, they take people’s money, and they steal it. Because they, they’ll take $20,000 from you, and they’ll build you a website that generates zero business. And that’s the vast majority of websites, the vast majority websites on the internet do absolutely nothing. And that’s because web designers who are allegedly professionals don’t understand anything about marketing. The very first thing you need to do is understand who the hell is your customer? Who’s your ideal customer, you’re looking for cheap houses, or you’re looking for expensive houses? Who’s your customer avatar, you need to understand that, then you need to do keyword research, you need to understand what it is those people are typing into Google, it’s pretty easy for a realtor generally, you know, are they searching for luxury real estate? Are they searching sell my house fast? That’s kind of a little bit easy. But for more hard, harder to understand business. Generally, people are searching for a problem. You know, they don’t know what the solution is. Otherwise, they just go and get that solution they’re searching for how to invest $50,000. You know, that’s a really good keyword for multifamily syndicators, I got a chunk of money, you got an inheritance or whatever? What am I what do I put this money, I’m searching for a problem and your business solves that problem. Then, from that keyword research that dictates everything, how you structure your website, how you write the content, and how you set your title tags and meta descriptions. And then that’s that building the website. And that’s the bit the web design is don’t understand. And then you need to, you know, show Google that you’re a trusted authority because Google wants to protect people, they want to make sure that their search results are accurate, and they can’t implicitly trust what you say. They have to trust what everyone else is saying about you. And that’s how they have important backlinks. But that my friend is only stage one, you’ve got someone to your website, that ain’t worth boo. You know, you can have people come to your website all day long, doesn’t mean you’re gonna make money. You need to turn that person into a customer. And you know, even Zillow, right, Zillow has a really fabulous web website that generates a lot of traffic, they don’t capture leads very well, they can improve their lead magnets substantially. Like a good example, is Amazon. Amazon converts way better than every other website on the planet. Because everyone knows and trust Amazon. If you’re searching for blue widgets on Google, and an Amazon comes up, you click on you go, yeah, cool. I trust these guys, you’ve already got an account. It’s very easy to buy with them. Where if you went to another website, you’re like, I don’t have these guys. If given my credit card number, is it safe? Is that product any good? Is it going to come to me like it’s you standing out a lot behind amazon in trust. So asking people for money straight up is a bad idea. Like a really good example. For say a syndication company, like I was just talking about how to invest $50,000. It’s generally like multifamily syndication, that’s the minimum investment. So that’s a really good keyword how to invest 50k. So you have a nice article about how to invest $50,000. Yeah, here’s a couple of different ways, the best one being multifamily. And people like wow, this guy really knows what he’s talking about. And then you have a nice call to action at the bottom, or like an ad on the side of your page, or you have a timed pop up or an exit in tempo, say, hey, download our free guide about the five biggest mistakes people make when getting started with investing, the more and that’s called a lead magnet, the more relevant your lead magnet is to whatever the content was, the better it’s going to convert. And there’s an old saying that the money is in the list. And it sure is that everything that’s all your website is meant to do attract people and get them onto your list. That’s stage one. And now you’ve got a lead. And this is where the valuable part comes in is your nurture campaign, you need to nurture that lead. So especially if you’re asking someone for 50k You don’t want to do it straight away, because they’re gonna go get out of here, dude, why are you a Nigerian prince? Where if you can nurture that person and go, yeah, hey, listen to me on this podcast. Yeah, watch this YouTube channel. Look at this article right now. Like, wow, this DJ guy knows what he’s talking about. And then by the time you go, Hey, how about you jump on a call, and I’ll show you how we can help you solve your problem. That person now already understands what you do. They already know your funny accent. So they’re not shocked when you pick up the phone. And they’re proactively sought you out. So you’re not filling up your pipeline with crappy leads. You’ve got really quality leads that for one aren’t gonna stand you up. They already understand what you do. They understand the commitment and they’re ready to buy. And that’s the purpose of a website.
D.J. Paris 14:54
Yeah, and I think the way a lot of realtors think about an approach to building a website And to be fair, we’re not picking on realtors, we love realtors, but they have to run every part of their business. This is not always something that they know a lot about, or can even spend a lot of time doing. So oftentimes, as Kris was saying at the beginning, is they hire a web designer who knows how to make things look beautiful and pretty and sparkling. And with, you know, even some video, right, right on the some, you know, background video, when you know, somebody visits the website, and it looks beautiful, and then all of a sudden, 1000s of dollars later, and they say, Well, it’s a nice online calling card, it’s certainly showcases how magnificent I am and how great of a realtor I am. But I’m not really getting any leads. And what Kris was really mentioning was, that’s because it wasn’t designed with the intent of capturing leads, and then pushing them through some sort of sales funnel. It’s, it’s really an online business card, which is fine, I guess. But you should also have parts of your website that are designed to solve problems, as Kris was saying is create content that will actually solve problems. And what you need to first do is think about what are the problems your clients have, and there’s a million different ways that you can solve those problems. But Kris had brought up a really great, easy suggestion for everybody out there who already has a website, create what they Kris mentioned a word and he said it very quickly, but I’m gonna explain what it is. He mentioned the word exit intent. And that is a really powerful thing that if you just remember one, one thing, you could easily implement this on your site, what Exodus intent is, is basically a tracker on your site that is going to notice when someone is either scrolling a certain way down the page, or is about to leave your website. And what that what you can do is you can very easily with really, really very little coding understanding at all, or you can hire somebody for very cheap to do this. They can put a little pop up an interstitial, that’ll show up and say, Hey, before you leave, download this white paper, download this, you know, but as Kris said, five biggest mistakes before investing $50,000 into multifamily property, right, that’s solving a problem. And that also add somebody, of course, as Kris said, to the most valuable part of your website, which is, of course, the lead and list generation.
Kris Reid 17:07
Can I like what we were talking about what you mentioned, that is a business card, right? So you can have fabulous, beautiful business cards. Sure you don’t do crap it unless you are out there handing them out. And that’s the same of the website. Beautiful websites don’t sell things. It’s words that sell things, and people need to see those words or it doesn’t diddly. You need to get in front of people, a beautiful website will convert better, but it won’t convert as well as one that gets a lot of traffic. That’s the number one thing. But just to touch on realtors, one thing they’re missing out on the most is the average American sells their house every seven years, right? When they want to just use the same realtor. If you have a nurture campaign that just even has a timed email to keep you top of mind, send him an email every couple of couple months, they’re not going to mind that and so when they’re ready to sell, sell their house again, boom, you’re already top of mind. But one thing to think about is I often speak to realtors that spend 1520 grand a month with buying leads from Zillow shirts, like crazy. Zillow doesn’t give a crap about you. They’re just selling those leads to whoever’s going to give them the most money. And so if someone else comes around with bigger pockets, hey, gonna boil those leads and you also gone or invest in your own business? And if How much is it worth? If you sell a house even a cheap house, you get 10 grand 10 grand commission check, sell a good house you 50 grand 100 grand like that there’s a lot of money. So what’s it worth building a website? I mean, like if you really spend just 50 grand on building a great website and ranking it. Wow, that you sell one house a year and it pays for it. Like how valuable is that? And then next year, the beauty of SEO over every other form of marketing is its compounding the work you did last year you get this year you get next year. So if you spent 50 grand build up awesome website and ranking and generating consistent reliable leads, and it makes one sale to pay for it. Next year, you get all that traffic for free. It doesn’t do you can stop doing SEO and and it keeps on working for it. That’s the power of a website and investing in your business.
D.J. Paris 19:15
Yeah, it’s such an important thing is I used to work for an IT company before I got into real estate and the the the Chief Technology Officer handed me a book we were we were doing some redesigns on some of the websites that that the properties we manage. And I had all of these beautiful aesthetic ideas of how to make the website you know, just gorgeous. And this is this goes back about 15 years and my ideas were good. They were aesthetically very pleasing. However, he said, Well, where do you want the customer to go when they visit the website? I said Oh, because I’d only thought about I want them to be impressed. I want them to see how beautiful everything is and that is a good idea. But then then what and he gave me a book and it was called Don’t make me think it’s a famous book. Look for user experience for websites for website designers, which basically is push somebody through the funnel had them down that path that you want them in, in an or Realtors case, you want them to sign up for either email notifications, or download some sort of white paper or guide that you have or subscribe to a YouTube channel or a Facebook page, you want them to do something or contact you directly. And you see you have a little, you know, for example, on Kris website, he has a Facebook Messenger plugin, which allows people to instantly chat with him and his team, whenever you visit his website, how valuable is that incredibly valuable, right? Because what’s happening is people are visiting his website, they’re like, probably have a million questions about SEO. And they don’t have to pick up the phone and call they can start typing in that’s just a simple plugin that anybody could add to their existing website.
Kris Reid 20:51
Yeah, for sure. You really don’t want to make people think it like it might sound counterintuitive, but people don’t. People are really lazy. They’re inherently lazy, your brain is always looking for shortcuts. And so if you can make it easy for someone, like whenever we’re in a, in a in a sales process around speaking to someone, we break it down really simple for him, and write it all down. If people can read it and see it, you read it to them, it makes so much. It’s just so much easier. So like what we do we work with a lot of multifamily people. And let’s go okay, so if you want to raise a million bucks, right, you need, say 20 investors at 50k. So how many people? Do you actually need to say that they’ll give you 50k? Because when it comes to
D.J. Paris 21:35
a lot more than that, yeah, exactly. So say, say 10
Kris Reid 21:38
times that. So you need 200 investors ready to go. So you can raise a million dollars in capital. So how many leads do you need to come in through your funnel? Before you get that to turn to good quality with leads, say 10 times. So you need 2000 people downloading your lead magnet? And what’s the conversion rate on your website. And let’s just say 10%, again, to keep it nice and easy. So you need 20,000 people coming to your website. So then you can just work out okay, great. This is the search volume of these keywords, these are the keywords that I need to rank for. And we can work backwards, this is the website that you need to build. And this is how much that costs. Now it’s very, it’s the beauty with any form of digital marketing, whether it’s YouTube ads, or Facebook ads, it’s so measurable and so predictable, you can draw it all out. And if you draw it out, even if you’re selling a house, you draw out the plan for your client, we work with some quite high end, Luxury Realtors, and they walk their clients through the whole process. You know, as a realtor, you’re used to doing it every day. And you’re like, everyone knows this, right? But that’s not true. Most people don’t buy and sell houses everyday. They don’t know the whole process. And so if you walk them through and they’re like, wow, this person really knows what they’re doing. I’m not gonna change shock or, and no surprises that I have to pay this fee here or this. They’re, they know the process and I trust you so much because you were transparent with it. And you saved them from having to think
D.J. Paris 23:07
so, so let’s Yeah, let’s talk about what Realtors could be doing more of so if you’re if I already have a website, and I’m not getting the leads that I want. I’m a realtor and you know I am a hyperlocal realtor, I have a specific geographic area that I want people who are searching to buy homes in my area. I want them to find my website and I understand Zillow is going to show up number one, Redfin is going to show up number two, that you know, I’m not going to be at the very, very top very easily it’s possible, but I understand I might not be at the top, but how do I just get some sort of presence where when people are searching, they might stumble across me,
Kris Reid 23:44
just searching your local area. And the more localized you get, the easier it is to rank so it’s better and if Zillow or Redfin are coming up, that’s great, because they’re easy to be on a local level, they suck. They just rank because they’ve got really big domain authority. The more backlinks, you have bigger your domain authority, and the easier you rank for anything. So it’s the same as Amazon. If Amazon comes up for any ecommerce website, ecommerce terms, like if you want to rank for blue widgets, and Amazon comes up, it’s really easy to beat Amazon. Amazon’s SEO is garbage. It’s just that they’ve got massive domain authority, and so they can rank for anything without trying so you can beat them on a local level. So one thing that’s very counterintuitive is more content about the same topic can lead to degra gated results. For instance, we’ve got a one client that sells luxury real estate in Atlanta. And you can only have one page that targets luxury real estate Lanta. If you have multiple pages, you get what’s called keyword cannibalization. And Google’s not sure which page should rank and different one will rank at different times and eventually start pulling each other down. So rather than have one page on the one page ranking in the top 10 of Google, you’ve got full pages ranking in the top 100 But only in the bottom. It’s it’s it’s not ideal. And so you need to be really specific and keyword mapping, you need to understand what keywords you want to rank for. And then which pages to rank for each one of those. But a really good example, is building out what’s called informational content. So you only have one page, it’s about luxury real estate in Atlanta, that you need to become synonymous with real estate and Atlanta. And so some really good keywords like cost of living in Atlanta, crime rate in Atlanta, best schools in Atlanta, you know, which shows google how this person knows everything about Atlanta, those sort of keywords are exactly what someone that’s moving to Atlanta is looking for. And they usually have really high search volume. And they’re really not competitive at all, because they’re not transactional, they’re not money keywords, they’re not going to convert at the same rate, as someone searching luxury real estate, Atlanta, but the search volume is so much higher, that you’ll still get clients where the main purpose is builds up your overall relevancy and trust with Google, Google wants to see not that you’re just there to take people’s money that you provide value, and that you’re about everything to do with Atlanta. So building localized information about whatever area you’re in, that’s really going to help your money pages rank better.
D.J. Paris 26:15
Yeah, so let’s use an example. So I’m moving to Atlanta, I’m a consumer, I don’t know anything about real estate. I’m not a realtor. And I have kids, young kids, and the most important thing, or one of the most important things is picking the right school district. Right. So the one of the things I’m going to type into Google before I move because I live in Chicago, I don’t know anything about Atlanta as what are the best, you know, a school districts in Atlanta. So what Chris is talking about is understanding what your customer needs, what they’re typing in what they’re searching for. And that’s a pretty obvious one that anyone with children is going to care about when they move to a new city. And guess what they’re going to search for it. So if you can create content, and it’s this is the important part, it has to be really great content, it has to be the best article about school districts in Atlanta, or at least a very good article, because you want people not only to show up and visit that page, but you want them to stay on that page and read your content. So what Chris is talking about is identifying problems and creating content that solves those problems, and realizing that this is not traditionally what Realtors do. Realtors are always you know, looking for real estate transactional stuff, they’re not looking to become an authority on a particular subject. But that’s exactly how you can capture leads.
Kris Reid 27:32
Yeah, and you and you think about the compound interest on that, right, you build a an article about the best schools in Atlanta, you rank it now. And it pays you month after month after month. And then you build another article about the best social clubs, best parks, best walking tours, best, best bars, best restaurants. And month after month, your website just gets more and more traffic, and it becomes a guide to Atlanta, people start linking to your content, because it’s so good. And Google just keeps rewarding you with good traffic. One of the things with SEO is it’s hard to get started because Google doesn’t trust you. And rightly so because anyone can build a crappy website and say that they’re the best in the world. And so they actually critique new websites, untrusted websites a lot harder. So it’s way more important to make sure that you don’t have any broken links to your site loads faster that it’s in really good shape, because Google’s looking at you with a fine, fine tooth comb to check that you’re not crap. So building up that trust and authority. But once you have a Google is just going to reward you with more and more traffic. And the more you get, the more Google likes you because they understand that people enjoy your content. So another thing is actually what’s called bounce rate. So if you have an article, best schools in Atlanta and our ranks and people click, people click on it, they go to your website, and they quickly come back to Google. Google sees that as a crappy search result. And they’ll they’ll drop you. In fact, a quite a funny story is there’s a SEO website called Backlinko.
D.J. Paris 29:07
And Brian, Dean, yeah, we love.
Kris Reid 29:10
And a few years ago, he wrote a wrote an article How to get high PageRank backlinks. And it rent in the in Google for the keyword how to get high. And he got a bucket load of traffic. But obviously, he’s got to the right track about how to get started. And so Google understood that very quickly, because the bounce rate was extremely high from that from that keyword, because it wasn’t relevant at all. And he only ranked for I can’t remember less than a day, I think, and got a massive amount of traffic and then dropped in the rankings instantly. That’s That’s what Google is trying to work out what pages to rank for, and what’s good for the user. So if you’ve got crappy content, it’s not going to convert and Google’s going to punish you.
D.J. Paris 29:58
Yeah, it’s a really good point. And you know, what you really want to do with the content is, so many people do a half assed job of content, they want to they identify a problem, for example, back to our Atlanta School District, you know, best school districts in Atlanta, and they write a mediocre article that really doesn’t inform we’ve all seen this, you know, all over the web. And then what happens is, maybe they do start ranking and people start visiting, as Chris was saying, and then what happens is people bounce out pretty quick, because they realize the content isn’t that good. Google notices when people bounce out, and they devalue that particular page, and probably the the website entirely. So what you really want to do is, is create just an incredible content. And for a lot of our listeners, they go oh, my gosh, I’m already doing every part of a real estate transaction. Now I have to create incredible content on you know, Atlanta school districts. Oh, I don’t have time for that. So what would you say to somebody who says, I know what I want to create, I don’t have either the knowledge or the time to actually put that content together. To two books
Kris Reid 31:04
that changed my life. I’ve read a lot of business books, and I think I’m doing pretty good at business. And two books that really changed my business, both by the same author called Mike McCalla wits. First Book is profit first about how to always have a profitable business, which kind of sounds easy, but it’s, it’s kind of not. Yeah, and so we met profitability and everything where we won’t do a job, that’s probably why the hell bother. And once you get that, and all your team members mindset that we need to make profit on this, or we’re not doing it, then you know, it, it’s a really good way to keep your whole team thinking that his other book is even more powerful. It’s called clockwork, and it’s about how to build a business that doesn’t revolve around you. And it’s so, so important. I’m not perfect at it that I took last week off, took my family up to the mountains, enjoy some, it’s hot as hell inside, and we want to escape the heat. And it was great. Now I came back, my inbox isn’t overflowing business is just number one massive. And that’s the purpose of business. Like every car that I mentioned, yeah, she three, three extra business 300% growth she had a baby was doing. And you know, we just did a new strategy for her. I’m delivering it to her on Thursday, actually. And it’s to make all the other team members stars so that she can really step back, you know, she’s got a new baby that she wants to be hanging out with. She doesn’t want to be selling houses at the same rate that she works. She wants to have other people doing, and building a business that’s not around her. And, you know, real realistically, if you sell houses, you should stick to selling houses. That’s what you’re good at. Unless you are an SEO expert, you should not be doing SEO, because it’s really hard. You have to learn a lot about it. I talk the talk, but man, I go and sit with our nerds and man, they they spin circles around me this stuff is really, really cheeky. But it’s really, really valuable. It’s like we as a problem first approach professionals to do our accounts, she does a way better job than we do. We outsource our payroll to a payroll company, because it’s not what we do. Everything that our team members should be doing is SEO, they should be working on our client sites all the time. Anything that’s not what our company does, is not what we do. And that’s the same for anyone in real estate, stick to what you’re good at, you probably don’t write your own contracts using a lawyer. And it’s the same user service provider and stick to what you’re good at. You know, if you spent 50k, and you sell $100 million worth the houses, like is that a good investment? Like why would you draw and do that yourself?
D.J. Paris 33:35
Yeah, it’s a really good point. And it’s one of those things that Realtors often you know, they get, they just get stuck in, oh, I don’t have time for that. And it’s like, well, that’s why there’s, we live in a global economy live in a gig economy. This is the time where you can now leverage people from all over the world who are experts. And we’re now no longer limited to, you know, finding, you know, if you needed a cold caller, for example, when people are still, I’m assuming some people are still doing cold calling, you would have to put an ad in a paper or an ad online and you’d have to interview people you know, locally and you’d hopefully find somebody good now the whole world is is eager to help meet those needs. And tell us a little bit about Artur SEO like what do you guys do? You know specifically for realtors?
Kris Reid 34:20
Yeah. So I wish that I’ve sucked at lots of things in business. And one thing is people said I should niche down I was like, that’s why we can do SEO for any business. Right? And you can we can work on any website. The same process works. And it’s really hard like we have, we do have clients in plenty of different niches and it’s really tricky when it’s a new niche that we know nothing about. But understand that business and who that customer is and it’s a lot of work. The more we’ve niched down into real estate so much easier. It’s great. Like, like we’ve got a luxury Realtor in Atlanta. We’ve got a luxury Realtor in Naples we go Little luxury Realtor in Toronto, it’s exact same thing. It’s like you just you just changed the city name and it’s exact same strategy. You know this the same with our multifamily people with we understand their businesses, we don’t have to do anything different. That saves so much work and heartache for us and make lets us streamline our business. So that’s what we do is this first conversation we have with a client is, well, how many more clients do you want? How many houses do you want to sell? How many leads do you need? What’s the customer worth to you? How much can you afford to pay to get one customer like if you if you sell if a deal is worth $50,000 to you? Well, you can spend quite a lot quite a lot to get that customer. And so that’s the sort of thing that we need to work out. But how many customers do you want the internet is so big, our little human brains cannot understand the numbers. It’s just unfathomable. Even in a any little niche, not Atlanta is a big city, you go to buck Haven, Brook headed the two most fancy fancy suburbs in Atlanta, this is my my knowledge. I’ve never even been to Georgia. But you know, even just those two suburbs have so much search volume, that it’s way too much for one one realtor, you know that it’s really, really big. So you really just need to understand how many customers do you want? You know, where do you want to be understanding, begin with the end in mind what success look like for you. And a lot of people have never thought about this and don’t know how to do that. And that’s one thing that we help people with, is let’s help you understand how big your market is, and set some goals for for the next year. And your goals will change. Like Avery’s goals were just sell a bucketload of houses. And I thought that, you know, she really wanted to be the number one realtor in the US. And she’s like, now I want to spend more time with my baby. And it’s like, okay, cool, then let’s redesign your strategy. So that, you know, it’s your your team members that are the stars now so that you can step back from from your business. And so once we understand what’s important to you, then we design a strategy of how to get you there. And with digital marketing. And that’s any form of digital marketing. It’s so predictable. It’s so good. You just draw out the numbers do the work, and it works every time.
D.J. Paris 37:18
Yeah, and it’s it’s complicated enough to where individual Realtors unless you are have a background in SEO or SEM or it or analytics, you’re probably better off hiring somebody. If not, you’re probably you’re definitely better off hiring somebody. This is just not your lane. And honestly, it’s not my lane either. And I used to live in this lane, it’s really not my lane either. But you hire a company like Chris’s to say, Okay, here’s my end goal, here’s what I want, what do I need to do? Or what can you guys do to help me get to where I want to go. And a lot of it has to do with they already have the data, they know the sales funnel, they know what gets people to click, we know what looks pretty, we don’t necessarily know what converts. And oftentimes what looks pretty is not what converts.
Unknown Speaker 38:10
Yeah, and that’s that’s the number that you need to focus on. Because search engine rankings and traffic said they’re not going to pay the bills it’s new customers do. That’s what you need to focus on how many customers are popping out the other end. And so just to give people a really great example of what a sales funnel is, have a look at ours, it works really well we get a lot of leads coming in and this, I don’t have time to talk to everyone, it filters out the crap, it makes sure that people understand exactly what we do, and that it is a big investment, I want to ask you for around $50,000 You’re going to I don’t want to speak to someone that’s not willing to invest $50,000 into their business, I can help you sell $100 million where the houses but it’s gonna cost you 50k That’s a pretty damn good return on your investment, you get $5 million, because you’re 50 grand Hell yeah. But you need to have a sales funnel that’s going to filter that stuff out. So if you go to art or seo.com/keeping it real, you’ll see a video of me. And if you pop in your details, I’ll do a video review for you. So I’ll show you exactly how many people are searching for your products and services, searching for houses in Atlanta or wherever you are, and in what quantity and then show you some simple things that you can do to get your website in front of where these people are and predictably grow your business and take a really close look at you know our signup forms the content on our pages, the emails that you’ll receive from us because that’s exactly what a great sales funnel looks like. It’s what keeps my calendar chockablock full, but only with really quality leads. I don’t have people that back when we I wasn’t such a good market and we had a crappy a website. Like I used to have people that would book calls and they wouldn’t turn up and it’s like Man that that ruins your diets, you’re wasting time you were waiting for someone they didn’t, that could have been a time when you were speaking over someone that’s gonna give you money, our conversion rates really high because people already understand what we do, and they’re proactively sought us out. And man, that’s what you want is a kickoff sales funnel. It’ll grow your business and save you time.
D.J. Paris 40:20
And I mean, if we think about it, just from a meta perspective here, don’t you want the same sales funnel that Chris has implemented for his own company? On your website? Wouldn’t that be great if you could somehow sift out the looky loos or the people that aren’t serious about working with a realtor or in Chris’s case, aren’t serious about investing in SEO, and funnel and somehow, number one, attract all of those people to your website. And then number two, filter out the people that aren’t really going to be a good use of your time or their time? And I mean, he’s already built this funnel for himself. So wouldn’t you want a similar funnel built for your website, but I promise you the the approach it takes to build something like this is a very different approach from what is considered common sense, or aesthetically what we like, we’re going to be thinking about what looks cool, what feels cool, does it flow? Well? Well, that’s all well and good if it also converts, which means you have to be able to sacrifice sometimes what aesthetically looks nice for something that actually works better. And that requires a tremendous amount of testing. And that’s what Chris’s company does is they actually go through and make adjustments along the way say, well, actually, this converts better even though maybe, I might not think it looks as good. It works actually better at the end of the day. What’s more important than generating leads is that’s the most important thing.
Kris Reid 41:39
So a good example is like please, Nigerian scammer emails, right? They have bad spelling mistakes on purpose because Wade, smart people from looking at them, it’s meant to get the naive gullible people. It’s so ridiculously outrageous that anyone that thinks about it is going to go away. And so that they’re filtering through and getting the people that they want, which is the gullible people that they can scam. Yeah, and that’s the same thing in adverse that you need to do is have your sales funnel filter out all the people that you don’t want to be wasting time with only speaking to your ideal client.
D.J. Paris 42:18
And let’s, let’s also before we wrap up, I talked about the real estate, you know, the virtual master summit that’s coming up. We’re big fans of this. We’re promoting quite a bit every one of our listeners and viewers absolutely should sign up. Chris is one of the speakers. Can you tell us a little bit about the summit?
Kris Reid 42:33
For sure. So we work a lot in real estate, and it’s and it’s brought us to put on the real estate master Summit. Our host of the summit is Tony Potts, who is the host of Access Hollywood and also hosted the Sundance Film Festival this year. Our producers produce for NBC. He’s working on Access Hollywood for 20 years. That’s how he knows Tony, and how we can be working together. We’ve got 42 speakers and massive lineup. It’s not podcast format. It’s where people are actually doing presentations and showing exactly what they they what they did. Our lineup is really huge. We’ve got people like Jim Kirkpatrick, who’s the vice president CBRE, my favorite marketer in the world Donald Miller from story brand has I’ve read his book three times. It’s fabulous. We’ve got Avery showing how she’d made 158 million in sales. Sam from real closers, Tristan from labcoat agents, David Greene from bigger pockets like 42 speakers in total. Everything from commercial real estate law marketing, sell my house fast, triple net leasing you know there’s 42 speakers and all of them are absolute ballers and it’s 100% free so go to real estate Master summit.com and get your free ticket
D.J. Paris 43:48
Yeah, please do this. We’ve had many of the guests that are featured on this have been on our show in the past. I think real estate marketing dude is also speaking at your event he is Yep. And we’ve had him on. He’s an old Chicago guy before he went out last but we love him but anyway guys, really we could not be a bigger fan there’s no catch here is absolutely 100% free real estate marketing summit.com and also your master selling real estate masters summit.com My apologies real estate masters summit.com and real estate marketing summit calm it’s probably something else we don’t want to go there real estate masters love it. But also maybe I should buy that. But also go to Artur seoardorseo.com forward slash keeping it real to see the sales funnel and see what Artur can do for you. We’re huge fans. Guys. You need a better converting website. Are you tired of buying leads? Are you tired of not getting conversions? You have a beautiful website and nothing’s happening. You got to do something about it. You got to get an expert in there and it’s not going to be the person that Sara Lee who designs the site, that person makes it look pretty, Chris’s team will make it actually work for you and generate income and generate leads. And look, I will tell you, I built our website for keeping it real pod. It might not be the most beautiful website out there. But you’ll notice when you go to my website for this podcast, keeping it real pod.com, what you’ll see in the bottom right hand corner is a little a little pop up, what do I want people to do? I want them to give me their email address. Why? Because every time we put out an episode, I shoot them an email. Now, we average about 10% of the people who visit our website, click, actually fill that out. And if you imagine over time over the last four years, imagine the size of our list, I don’t even know how big it is. It’s 1000s and 1000s, of brokers at this point, realtors, because all I did was just put a little thing in there that by the way, you can listen to every episode we’ve ever done, you can do all sorts of cool stuff on our website. But what I really want people to do is fill out that little form and give me their email address so that I can send them every time I do an episode right to their inbox, you need something like that, but don’t try to do it all yourself. Hire a company like Chris’s like art or SEO and they can work with you and get you to where you want to be. You need more leads. We all need more leads.
Kris Reid 46:14
And money’s in the list. Man, the money is in the list.
D.J. Paris 46:17
Well, what a great place to wrap up. I want to thank Chris on behalf of all and I apologize if you’re watching this, you’ve noticed that my room has gotten much darker because I am in I’m at home to Chris, of course is in Vietnam. So we’re doing this from home to account for the time differences. And it is now fully pitch blackout outside we started with slight. So if you’re seeing what has happened, there’s no magic going on to the simply the nighttime at my place. But if you’re not Yeah, the sun’s over over Chris. It’s only set. It’s about 8am where Chris says it’s about 8pm My time. So anyway, we want to thank Chris for taking time out of his busy busy morning, and really getting up early to be on our show. And we want to thank on behalf of the audience want to thank Chris for being on and talking about Artur SEO talking about the real estate master Summit. And of course all the information about SEO that that Realtors need to understand. And also on behalf of Chris and myself, we want to thank our listeners as well as our video watchers. And remind everyone if you want to help us support our show and continue to grow. Tell a friend think of one other real estate agent that could benefit that wants to get to that next level that wants to double their production and hasn’t yet figured out how to do that, send them a link to our show, you can send them right over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. We’ll be eternally grateful. So Chris, thank you so much. And also everyone before we go go sign up for the real estate master Summit. This is I mean really, we get invited. Being in that we have a real estate podcast we get invited to so many different conferences. None of them are free. None of them are free. This is the only one with 42 speakers guys. I know some of these people. It is amazing. What a brilliant idea. So real estate masters summit.com. And also Artur seo.com. Forward slash keeping it real. Chris, thank you so much for being on our show.
Kris Reid 48:10
Thank you sir
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