Leadpile’s Blog

Lately it seems to be a dog-eat-dog world with all our search engines trying to get the biggest piece of the search engine “puzzle”. Yesterday I spoke about search engines and the need to bring new things to the table in order to stay competitive with other search engines. Ask.com is one of those search engines that is offering a unique service that other search engines are not offering. For instance, Ask.com is great for longer questions you want answered versus entering them in a standard Google search, and having to filter through all the results. Comscore reports that Ask.com’s ranking rose from 10th place to now 6th place, compared to other properties such as eBay and Facebook (in May based on unique users). This explains why a lot of Leadpile publishers are using this search engine to generate traffic to their payday loan, debt, auto finance, online education and other websites. Just like search engines trying to do something different to attract users, affiliate marketing and lead generators have to think of unique ways to generate traffic to their properties. Ask.com seems to be a good option to consider. It appears that others think so too, and that’s why their rankings seem to be headed in the right direction. Another GREAT alternative to the Google BEAST!

Running an effective business you now have to have a website to help promote it worldwide. However, creating a good website is not enough, you have to have it promoted in the internet’s search engines. This is something easier said than done. Creating a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is very important on getting that desired traffic to your website. I thought this was a good basic article about some things to really pay attention to.

1. Most prospects to your website will be coming from search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask etc).
2. Well known search engines work the best.
3. Most prospects use phrases, not single words, to do a search on the search engines.
4. Track the prospects experience on your website.
5. Optimize using more than just one search engine.
6. Check and analyze the results of your tracking/reporting.
7. Use results from tracking to update your site where needed.
8. Prospects rarely go beyond the first or second page of in the search engine results. Work to get on those pages in order to benefit from your SEO strategy.
9. Keyword density is a major part of the ranking of your website.
10. Successful keyword placement.

Having our website, and our publisher’s websites, ranked high in the search engines is key to getting the traffic to get leads. Leadpile Lead Exchange believes quantity is not necessarily the key to success, but quality is.

Ever wonder what search engine terms are used the most? I know I do, and search terms also tell a little bit about what is going on in the world around us. According to dmconfidential, eBay gets the award for the top terms (eBay and eBay.com)in the month of August. People trying to find bargains, or sell items they have I would say is partially responsible for this. Home depot was the next highest term used, followed by mapquest. The shopping/office supplies category received 43.15% of all paid search traffic. The fortunate thing is that this is an 8% increase from July’s 39.81%. Maybe people are staying home and doing more of their shopping online to try and get the best deal, without driving store to store. Business telecommunications and pharmaceutical & medical traffic was slightly up. However, travel and business/legal traffic was down for the month of August.
Another interesting fact, yet not surprising, is that Google accounted for 71% of all US searches in the month of August. In a distant second place was Yahoo with 18.26% followed by MSN (5.32%) and Ask (3.45%).
To truly be effective with lead generation, knowing this kind of information and detailed information about the verticals you are promoting is key to being successful. For instance, someone who is doing PPC for payday loan will loose a lot of money if they are not first aware of everything there is to know about payday loans, and also if they do not understand search engines.
Here at Leadpile, I am going to do everything I can to help publishers know what buyers are maybe looking for in a particular lead type. This helps with how the traffic is driven to the website and ultimately helps with conversions and payouts. Communication with your affiliate manager or account manger is key to running a successful lead generation campaign.