Leadpile’s Blog

Day in and day out I have great conversations about what a publisher thinks they should do to become an effective affiliate in the Leadpile Marketplace. Like other networks, there are certain things that any affiliate should do to become an effective affiliate marketer. The Examiner points out some good points on becoming a successful affiliate marketer.

1. Create a website
*Don’t just throw a website together and not put any thought into it. Add some creativeness and content to the website, so others can enjoy their experience too.
2. Create a website about something you enjoy
*Design your website around something you enjoy and will want to work on. If you are excited about the website then that will come through to the visitors, and they will enjoy their experience too.
3. Take the website seriously
*Unfortunately, just having a website is not enough. The website has to flow well. Putting the right type of design and content on the site will ultimately make the site attractive and EFFECTIVE.
4. Build links
*Once you have a completed website, you want to try and get ranked in the search engines. Having other sites link to your site will ultimately help with this search engine ranking, but you have to have something on your site to make others want to link to you. Once you have others linking to your site, you now have 2 ways for people to get to your site- search engine AND other sites that have linked to you. Having traffic to your site is ultimately the goal because that potentially = more $$.
5. Develop affiliate partnerships
*Monetizing your website with offers and banners is a great way to make money with your completed website. Using companies like Leadpile allows you to capture leads from your site, and then earn revenue from those leads selling. The other way is working directly with traditional affiliate networks like CJ. Do your research and find offers that will flow with the website you have created AND make you money. Once this project is working well, look at doing it all over again with additional websites to maybe run other sorts of offers. Find your niche and what you are good at doing effectively. Is it financial offers, product offers, work from home offers, or a combination of them all?
6. Track statistics of your website
*To help you determine what is working well for you on these sites, then you might want to implement some sort of tracking system. Monitoring your statistics will allow you to make necessary changes with your campaigns. Utilize various sources of traffic and see what works with the particular site. Some networks will control how you drive traffic to the site, so you will always want to find that out. Finds networks that even have their own tracking available for you so you can have that as an additional source of information. You can never have too much information to be successful in the affiliate world!
Become a Leadpile Super Affiliate………

It’s a sad day in one of America’s great cities, and for one of the that city’s oldest businesses.  What can be said when a business that is almost 150 years old has closed its doors?  The last edition of the Rocky Mountain News was published this morning.  Yesterday, the owners announced there would be only one more edition of the paper.  It was not a total surprise, as the paper was recently for sale, but shock and sadness was felt in the newsroom, and throughout greater Denver.

There is little blame to be passed around, as the business model of daily newspapers has abruptly changed for the worse.  The poor economy has drastically affected display advertising, and classified advertising has either moved online or been drastically reduced.  The newspaper industry could perhaps overcome the loss of one revenue stream, but they cannot handle the loss or reduction of two revenue streams.  Heck, their third revenue stream (subscriptions) is also down.

Sadly, there are only about ten cities that still have two daily general interest newspapers.  A community is always served better by two voices rather than one.  More newspapers will surely close and some are looking again at charging for online content. (An experiment that hasn’t work for most papers)  If it’s not too late, perhaps some papers can figure out a way to monetize their websites.  (Please contact our V.P. of Marketing, Eugen Ilie, if assistance is needed.)

Tomorrow morning will be sad, and very different for many in Colorado.  Change is usually good, but when it is quickly forced on you, it can be unsettling.  Enjoy that cup of the coffee, and for many, the “Rocky” will be missed, but not forgotten.

First, I would like to say congratulations to our next president of the United States. No matter who everyone voted for, we are all keeping an eye on how the future of our struggling America pans out.  Secondly, there was something that America should really pay attention to, and that is an amazing effect the internet had on the election of our 44th president.
The internet AND social networking tools contributed to the Barack Obama being elected. According to businessstandard.com,“Obama, on his part, has refined the digital act further — a fact revealed during his presidential announcement speech in Springfield last October when he said: “Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age…” A few examples of this being implemented, was in the case where almost 300,000 people created accounts on the barackobama.com website, he became the first YouTube politician, got involved on Facebook, MySpace, text messaging and all other avenues of the internet for fund raising and party awareness.
Another interesting aspect in this presidential campaign was, “Obama has proposed the creation of the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that the American government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will have a specific focus on transparency, by ensuring that each arm of the federal government makes its records open and accessible as the e-government Act requires. The CTO will also ensure technological interoperability of key government functions”, according to Business Standard.
No matter who was elected, the excitement of the internet and the power it can have also excited Leadpile Lead Exchange. We are in it for the long hall on wherever this great internet craze LEADS us!

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.

When and why a Lead Exchange would work? I’ve read many articles on this topic and none seem to understand why an Exchange would work. Mostly it’s because they don’t know what Affiliate Marketing is, and how to generate revenue by promoting websites online. 

We all know that behind every online business stands the “Traffic”. The traffic a website has determines the revenue the site will make. After you have the traffic, you need to have the smart people behind it that understands what to do with it. 

The value of a Lead Exchange stands in its Lead Generation capability, the Network of Affiliates they have, and what tools they make available to its partners. 

Without the Leadgen platform and the Affiliates that use the tools effectively, the Lead Exchange/Marketplace it is nothing more than an “Aggregator”. We all remember the “Aggregators” and their stories. Buying a lead from here and sell it somewhere else for a profit. 

Leadpile has been focusing on the Leadgen, offering alternatives to the existing Affiliate Marketing for over 7 years. Not only that we know what it takes to be successful in generating leads from Search, but we know what painful it is when you use the traditional Affiliate Networks like CJ (CommissionJunction.com). 

The MicroClick Forms and Ads (www.MicroClick.com) are just the front-end pieces of the Exchange, the real stuff starts when you start promoting them and get into the Tracking available in the Exchange. 

The airline industry is officially getting a piece of the pie…. the “internet” pie that is. According to the Associated Press today, American Airlines is officially adding internet access to in-flight services it provides. The company that is going to get a piece of this “internet” pie is a company called Aircell LLC.
In a time when you pay for water, soda and everything in between, now you have the ability to purchase internet access for a nominal fee of $12.95. For those that are addicted to the internet, and can not stand the idea of being in flight with no internet, now have their wishes coming true. Having the ability to work while you fly is now becoming a reality for those that are willing to pay for the service. Does this mean new in-flight etiquette will be compromised by those that will be trying to access the internet? Will there be some inappropriate internet website viewing for the passenger in the next seat?
There is a side of this that is kind of crazy in a sense that people can not live without the internet. We have internet access at home, cars, on the go (on our cell phones), and now when we fly. Other Airlines will soon follow in this new service being provided to it’s passengers, however what or where else are we missing that the internet has not become a part of?
Leadpile Lead Exchange would love to have a piece of the pie with being able to have leads generated, even while consumers are in the clouds flying from destination to destination.

In 2006, I took a lot of heat for predicting One Trillion Dollars in retail Online Sales by 2012.

According to Emarketer and Nielson Online, Eight out of 10 respondents who had recently made consumer electronics purchases in a brick-and-mortar store said they had visited the store’s Website first. More than one-half said they purchased from the retailer on whose Website they had spent the most time. In addition 58% of respondents said they would choose the Internet for research in purchases before they would even choose their own friends and family.

While this study reported about Electronics, it is not a far reach to think that consumer research will certainly continue to dramatically increase in years to come.

At the Leadpile Lead Exchange, we are seeing consumers’ research under-banked services at exponentially increasing rates.

Look out Trillion! Here it comes!

According to CNBC there is a great new website being rolled out by the same company that owns Lending Tree and Ask.com- LIFE123.com.

We all use the internet as a source for information no matter what the topic is. Searching for information on the internet has truly become something we are “addicted” to. Well, there are a lot of resources available to search for information, besides just the search engines.
This great new website is a source for information that you will want to know more about. This site could be compared to such sites as About.com or chacha.com (which I did a previous post on).

What is Life123.com?
Life123 is the place to start when you need some answers to some questions you have about pretty much anything. The web site is full of experts that can help people quickly find information on a wide range of life topics.

Why Life123?
More and more, people are using search engines, however we are not always getting the information we need. According to the life123 website, roughly 75% of Americans experience search engine fatigue. Everyone has spent hours looking for information without finding what they really need.

What does Life123 cover?
Life123 covers 11 life categories: Beauty; Style, Celebrations, Food; Drink, Health; Wellness, Home; Garden, Money, Parenting; Family, Relationships, Technology, Travel; Leisure, and Work.

Enjoy LIFE!

I heard about this service called Ask Sunday on the radio and I was curious about it so I checked out the website.  It’s a personal assistant for those of us who can’t afford one like the stars or the truly wealthy have. NOW WE CAN! with Ask Sunday we can get the help of a personal assistant, someone who schedules appointments, makes general purchases like flowers and small gifts purchased online or over the phone, search for a plumber, electrician or a guy to re-roof your house for you. 

They can also work on those pesky projects we all lose time working on. Gathering information off of all those websites to put into 1 page of info for your boss, transcribe a meeting, or many other things that they have listed on the web site.  They also have full service travel agents who can help plan your next vacation. No matter what it is. Need help Fixing your computer. They can also help with that.

All this does come at a price though. They have packages that you can choose from depending on what your needs are.  Lite, Silver and Gold. Silver is the most popular at 30 days for 15 requests at $39.00 and 90 days for 45 requests at $89.00. Each additional task is only $1.75.

Here at Leadpile we can help you with all your lead buying and selling requests and it does not cost a thing. Just a phone call or an email and we will assist you the best way we know how. The Leadpile Way!

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On a previous post I spoke about Lower My Bills (LMB) and some changes they were going through. However, I think I am seeing some changes going on again. Looking around on the net I saw some of those “dancing” people, yet the advertisement were about AUTO INSURANCE? Yeah, auto insurance! The ad was a LMB advertisement about lowering your auto insurance rates. So, is LMB RE-focusing on other industries besides JUST refinance? If you take a look at their website it talks about all sorts of lead types, however I guess we usually all know them for mortgage, NOT insurance. Maybe something new is in the works?

According to RUMORY.com, some companies could be experiencing some potential changes to adjust with the declining economy. Tough times right now for just about any industry. I will say Leadpile Lead Exchange is fortunately thriving while others are going through some tough times.
Will all the major online lead generation companies survive, and if they do what will their main focus for lead gen be in?

Many in the world would be so jealous of a particular women who had a lot of debt (20k), created a website, and asked for help. This equaled HUGE success for a lady named Karyn. You have to hear about this success story and really how effective the internet is…. and that there are lots of other people in the world with lots of debt! The difference is: Karyn asked for help and got it!

Debt is a common part of what each person in America has, but have you ever thought about taking control of it by asking for help through “other” means? Most of us have not, however what we do do is either continue to struggle paying the minimum payments each month, or we just stop paying them. However, maybe more of us need to get creative and use some different resources to get help.
Then again, there is the traditional way and that is to try and work with specialized debt consolidation/debt settlement companies that help customers in this situation. I know a lot of people are submitting their request for more information about debt help, because the debt lead type is a HUGE lead type in the Leadpile Lead Exchange. Not all of us are as bold and entrepreneurial as Karyn! Either way, I give her props because she is now debt free and continuing her life now as a successful author.
IF YOU WANT IT… GO OUT & GET IT!

Have you ever gone on a road trip and you just could not remember the name of that monument you were going to see? How about what temperature is it in Denver where your child is visiting her father? How about where is the nearest Taco Bell? Any question you want to know there is an answer at your fingertips… literally!

Something innovative you have to know about… the website Chacha. This website was created as a tool for people that need a question answered while on the go. It’s simple: dial 1-800-2cha cha, state your question, and within just a couple minutes the answer to your question is sent to you via a text message.

Those questions you ask are being answered by real people set up as “expert guides” to answer these questions for Cha-cha. The great thing is there is no limit on what sort of questions you can ask. There could even be questions that are asked that are non emergency situations, maybe someone is in a real bind and needs some help.
Today, the technology that is available to us is amazing and so innovative. Companies like Chacha, Leadpile Lead Exchange, Apple and other companies that remain one step ahead of everyone else, will thrive in future years! I have to say this innovative idea to use your cell phone for something more than talking on it is great. Even payday loan lead generators are bringing in high lead volume through text messaging. Not everyone has an Apple iPhone and can “google” something on the go.
It’s not WHAT you know as a company… it’s what NEW and INNOVATIVE practices can the company come up with, before the next guy.
What will people think of next?????