Lead Generation Tips #1

This is the first of what i hope is a series of online ‘lead generation tips’ blog entries I hope to write. I just thought it might be useful to share our experiences with others who wish try their habd at what we enjoy doing most.

The long term driver of our business is lead generation or more online sales. Also known as lead brokering or affiliate sales. Our SEO skills afford us the ability to create whatever websites we like and market them on the internet. Then we can either earn ongoing commision from sales or selling the leads they receive through contact forms.

That sounds great. And easy. But as we are a young company business experience wise, we are also having to discover not only how to do this successfully, but also hopelessly. Thankfully it is not expensive for us without development of asset costs, just some of our time here and there.

For example we have one website designed to attract bad credit finance leads. We chose this because we know that there is a lot of money to be made in busy finance websites and noticed a good domain name that was available. Sounds cool so far.

So we made the site and did some seo work on it and within a couple of weeks, boom, we are getting qualified leads every day. Still sounding good right.

However, firstly because we did not expect such a quick result, we had not bothered to find a lender to buy the leads. I know that sounds daft, but we just did not expect such a quick result and when we had made a few calls earlier about different loan sites, brokers were jumping at the chance to buy the leads. So no big deal, we will just get a lender.

Now a couple of weeks and a few phone calls later….no lender. Turns out bad credit finance leads don’t convert as well as other finacne leads because a lot of them are just people who are desperate for money, who you must be stupid to lend money too. That makes sense in hind site (?spelling?) but …..it sounded like a good idea at the time.

A bad credit website we had promoted to the top of Google on phrases like ‘bad credit loans’ and run a very successful adwords campaign for would have been happy to pay fifty dollars for the leads when we were working for them. But that was a year ago when the finance sector was still cruising. With the ‘credit crunch’, banks and so forth don’t feel so comfy lending money to bad credit type loans.

Here we are today, offering up these good leads now for $8 each. It does not seem to worth it wouldn’t you think. But it is just on autopilot now and as I said there are leads coming every day. So it is not a total loss. The industry will eventually turn around.

So my first tip is to select your product well and research it thouroughly before you invest your time and money. Will your product still be selling as fast in six months and if not is it worth it?

And secondly, have everything ready before you launch. Finding a buyer might be easy today when you have the idea but will it still be as easy when you get off the ground? This makes sense not only for online brokers and affiliates, but also for anyone wanting to sell a product or service online.

I will add other lead generation tips as I have the time and hope you come back to read them too.

If you have made such mistakes or want to comment on this…..go on, write about it.