Leadpile’s Blog

Payday loans are something that we discuss a lot on this blog, and are happy to let our readers know that we are expanding our payday loan/cash advance market into Canada. There was a high enough demand to warrant Leadpile to venture into this fairly unsaturated market. We are proud to be able to help those in Canada get connected with those lenders that want to provide them with one of these short term loans. If you are already a Leadpile publisher, you can access this new offer in your seller account. If you are not currently a part of the Leadpile Marketplace, contact us immediately!!! We look forward to this great new market that we are now venturing into!

Leadpile is looking for more publishers to drive traffic to our car warranty offer. With recent changes to the car warranty industry, many are turning to the internet for leads of people looking to purchase a car warranty/auto service plan/vehicle protection plan. Leadpile realizes this, and has created custom banners and a landing site for our publishers to utilize. If this is something that you would be interested in doing, let us know!

In the last few years many new ad networks or lead exchanges have surfaced. Many have survived and many have not. The need for networks and exchanges like Leadpile Lead Exchange came about because of the desire to connect multiple publishers with multiple advertisers to create simplicity for both parties. In addition to simplicity, is there any other reason that a publisher or advertiser should look at using a network versus one on on relationships?
1. As consumers get online more and more, publishers and advertisers need to figure out the best way to get the largest captive audience in once place. This is very difficult if you are trying to set up one on one relationships. Networks and exchanges allow this to be done without the hassle of developing one on one relationships.
2. There are cost benefits to the advertisers with working with network versus working directly with a publisher who usually has higher margins than the networks. This increase cost if passed on to the advertiser, whereas networks have higher volumes which allows there to be more of an ability to have lower margins.
3. The advertisers can capture all types of traffic sources in just a few networks versus trying to get a different publisher for each traffic source they are interested. For instance, to really diversify you want to utilize social networking, PPC and SEO, and SMS marketing.
4. Networks allow publishers an opportunity to sell their traffic/leads to various types of buyers/advertisers which allows them to diversify their ads to have everything funnel through one place, versus setting up one on one relationships with each advertiser.
5. Sophisticated networks/exchanges like Leadpile offer the technical capabilities for advertisers and publishers detailed reporting of the their campaigns. This creates simplicity for the publishers or advertiser with being able to have one place to track all their campaigns. This could be very large headache for someone to track each campaign they have one on one with.
Everyone in this industry has their own opinion on what is more effective: networks or one on relationships, however there just seems to be more benefits with working with an exchange or network versus trying to set up one on one relationships.

In an effort to connect those that have some leads to sell, those looking to purchase leads, and those working in the lead generation business, Leadpile has rolled out it’s own Classifieds Section. So are you someone who is looking to sell a large list? The Leadpile classifieds section will be the place for you to try and sell that list to someone who is in need of it. Or you could be a company that is looking for a unique lead type, and we might be the perfect place for you to post that ad to get those leads. It’s free to sign up!

GOT LEADS?
NEED LEADS?

Google has rolled out some recent videos to help improve your landing pages and conversions. The video discusses aspects that would be helpful for converting visitors, versus driving them away. The 7 deadly sins of landing page design is a little lengthy, but certainly a video that you can take something away from. Leadpile publishers might want to take a look!

The days of newspaper and magazine advertising seems to be becoming more and more extinct as businesses turn to online direct response advertising. Online direct advertising incorporates lead generation, search and online directories into one category and then there is national and local digital media. Businesses seem to be turning more and more to generating clients through search and other more “targeted” media because of the better end result = more business. The costs to print newspapers and magazines has not become as profitable as in previous years because many are not turning to print to get their news, they are turning to a more instant “fix” like the internet. Knowing this, publishers and advertisers are also turning to the internet for customer’s attention. Lead generation companies, like Leadpile, have become more and more in demand as the cost to convert even things such as a television ad to a interested customer rise.
Biz report points out that, “Besides online search, the forecast predicts that online direct response marketing, a new category in 2009, will increase by 2.9%.” Other reports show that by 2014 this sort of advertising is set to increase by 10%. This is great news for lead generation companies and our search engines. However, the picture does not seem as good for national digital media (rich media, online video, email, display and mobile) which is set to decrease by 11%, and local digital media (ie: television, radio and newspapers) to decrease by 5%. The good news is the report also points out that both are set to rebound in future years.
My question is how are other advertising sources, besides online media, going to adapt to increase their revenue? This has to be something that is very challenging for many companies who have built empires by using these non-online media companies (ie- newspapers and magazines). I can’t imagine how people survived in earlier years without the internet, and the capabilities it has to reach so many people in such a little place (computer). This reminds me of growing up and parents stating they did not have televisions or things like calculators in their daily life. I could never understand how they survived, which I know now sounds silly. What will be the next innovative creation that will change our world???????? Who will discover it?

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!

Some very interesting information regarding women and what they prefer. Bizreport.com study finds that women of different age ranges are either on their PCs or their mobile phones more so than the other. This information is very important for Leadpile publishers because knowing your demographics and how to create sites effectively, will ultimately make or break your success with marketing. The study finds that women under the age of 25 tend to be more on their mobile phones, versus on the PC. Whereas women over the age of 40 tend to be more on their PCs. This means that mobile content types of sites should really be geared towards the younger age women, where the web based sites should really target the older women. If these two groups of women are spending their time on one or the other, really how does this affect publishers wanting to generate leads?
This really points out a few different things to pay attention to if you want to effectively market to women. If you are looking for various sources of advertising you might tend to be more effective with younger women if you are using things such as social networking, SMS marketing or Google Adsense on mobile applications. Your target audience would be younger and you would want to choose lead types that would work well with this demographic. However, if you are wanting to target a product/service to older women utilizing the traditional web would be the way to go.
This study really makes sense in the fact that the younger and younger generation will adapt to what is the most up to date technology, where older women are more comfortable in the PC world that they were brought up in. My guess would be if this study had included women over the age of 60, that they would tend to not have much involvement on the internet, and other sources of advertising would work better with them. Understanding what is going on with different demographics is very important as a publisher, because if you are not marketing effectively you waste time and advertising dollars. Studies such as this one is something to pay attention to and really try and understand, so we all can become effective in marketing our products and services to the right target market.

Effective June 3rd, Microsoft’s Live Search will be replaced by Bing.

Microsoft describes Bing as the new “decision engine”. Being that Google dominates about 3/4 of the search engine world, Microsoft is hoping to get a bigger piece of the pie with Bing. Bing will emphasize categorization and depth in search results in an attempt to compete with Google for market share in addition to ad dollars. Looking at Bing it looks a lot like Google, but when searching it tends to bring up a little more in depth information. Will the Leadpile publishers and affiliate marketers utilize this new search engine to generate traffic/leads?

In recent news, Google announced some changes with it’s Adwords trademark policy. The new policy will now allow advertisers to utilize trademarked names in their text ads, even if the trademark does belong to someone else. Previously, advertisers could only use generic terms, however with this change advertisers can utilize brand names. There seems to still be some restrictions that Google outlines in their trademark policy. With these changes, Google is now in line with Yahoo and Microsoft, who had already made these changes. This loosened trademark policy is now more in line with standard practices in the offline world.
These new changes to Adwords certainly is something our Leadpile publishers will want to pay attention to.

In a previous post, I pointed out the importance of the Long Tail concept. This concept was coined by Chris Anderson and it states niche products and services in low demand could be the big revenue generators.  Chris Anderson is also promoting businesses to embrace the “freemium” concept.

He believes that anything on the internet will be FREE, and companies will be competing with this idea unless they choose to offer FREE.  According to InternetNews.com, “There are a lot of ways to make money,” he said.  Give a basic version of a service or application away for free, but also offer more full-featured versions.” With a “freemium” type model, a product or service is offered free to a large number of customers hoping a minority will pay for a premium or added-value service.

How could this maybe relate to lead generation or the Leadpile Marketplace?
How about the idea of giving away leads for FREE knowing that down the road this is going to result in a long term satisfied client? How about offering potential great partners FREE web design assistance or custom banners and forms? People get to use the service and understand it’s value, then they want to commit based on their experience with already using the company.” This concept is really not anything new, but maybe in the lead generation business it is time networks look at not just each individual client as a way to make the most money, but look at offering something to clients for free, knowing that the long term benefit to their company is much greater.

Sounds like the idea …give a little, get a lot!

The idea of a “lead exchange” or “lead generation” was not something everyone knew about in the internet world years ago. However, with consumers being online more AND advertisers wanting to get more qualified consumers, lead generation has become a very popular space to be in. The space has been getting more and more competition, and Leadpile is happy to say there have been record numbers that have joined our marketplace and helped to make this marketplace a HUGE success. One major factor in this success is knowing how to effectively match up the consumers with advertisers. According to a recent Leadpile Press Release, “Astoundingly, LeadPile’s MicroClick™ form had 2,628,345 impressions in the first quarter of 2009, or loaded approximately once every three seconds on the Internet.” Leadpile seemed to have found that way to be effective with both the publishers and advertisers, so the consumer wins in the end!
This is great news for our marketplace…
We look forward to the rest of 2009, and look for any feedback to help achieve GREAT success!

GREAT WORK TEAM!