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Experts offer tips on generating, buying sales leads at Connect Generate them yourself, buy them from aggregators, or hire somebody to drum them up for you. If you're in the real estate or home lending business, you need sales leads.

Experts with companies that do all of the above were at Real Estate Connect San Francisco Wednesday to offer advice. With more people shopping for mortgages online, lenders who want to generate their own leads can try optimizing their Web sites or paying fees to make sure they are featured prominently in search-engine results.

Every month, 9.4 million people get on the Internet to shop for a mortgage, said media analyst Greg Sterling, citing research by Compete Inc. Sterling, the moderator of the panel, "Top of the Funnel: Search Engine and Portal Marketing," said one in four consumers find their way to lenders' Web portals through links from other real estate sites.

Search engines drive about the same percentage of traffic to mortgage lenders. Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN use formulas that attempt to rank results based on their relevance. You can hire an expert in search-engine optimization to make sure your site shows up higher in the so-called "natural" results. If you've got the money to burn, another way to drive traffic to your site is to place bids on the keywords consumers use in their searches.

The highest bidders end up on top of the paid search results, placing them in "the golden triangle" -- the area of a consumer's computer screen that's most likely to catch their eye and generate a click, Sterling said. Dean DeBiase, chairman and chief executive officer of Fathom Online, said he recommends that his clients focus on paid search, spending about $9 on that for each dollar they spend on search-engine optimization. But turning up on top of paid results can be an expensive proposition.

Surveys show aggregators like LendingTree and ChampionMortgage.com are willing to pay up to $8 a click for keyword search terms like "mortgage" and "refinance," Sterling said. That's part of the reason aggregators -- Web sites that generate leads for lenders -- get 75 percent of online home loan applications.

With national lenders and aggregators willing to pay top dollar for keywords, "You're talking about a real inventory squeeze," Sterling said. "What the hell do people do when they get squeezed out of these top spots?" For smaller firms working local markets, "It's better to go after the longer tail," said Jamie Glenn, vice president of product development for Trulia, a vertical real estate search site.

Glenn recommended bidding for more specific keywords that describe the product you're offering or the market you do business in -- like a city or neighborhood. One drawback to that approach is that you may have to bid on, and track the results of, hundreds or even thousands of keywords.

Sam Sebastian, Google's director of classifieds and local advertising, said sometimes it makes more sense to just buy leads, rather than generating them yourself. "If you're a smaller, more local lending organization, don't spend a ton of money on search," Sebastian said. "Buy leads. Because it's much more efficient to buy that lead from LendingTree than trying to get better terms on Google or Yahoo!" ROOT Markets lets buyers and sellers trade leads in a setting modeled after stock markets and commodity exchanges.

The quality of the leads is validated and verified by TARGUSinfo. The panelists agreed that online marketing, paid search and search-engine optimization are best used in conjunction with -- not instead of -- traditional print, radio and TV ads. "If someone runs a billboard in a local market, or ads on local TV stations, you can see how those offline campaigns perform via the metrics on search," Sebastian said.

"I think online and search can help evaluate offline campaigns and results. It's easy to change message and test things." Steve Horowitz, senior vice president of product and business development at mortgage aggregator Bankrate.com, said that in addition to its Web site, the company sells consumer mortgage guides in about 500 newspapers.

"We've had people come off the Bankrate (Web site) table, and move all their money into print," Horowitz said, largely because the types of loans originated by newspaper ads are more profitable to lenders. There's no one-size-fits-all formula for deciding how much to spend on online marketing efforts versus traditional mediums.

"We have some companies spend 80-20 online-traditional, and others that do just the opposite," Fathom Online's DeBiase said. An interactive marketing firm, Fathom Online provides analytics that help its customers determine how effective their online campaigns are -- a must for any business, panelists said.

"We're getting people to spend 5 to 10 percent online to jump in, and more as analytics prove to you effective marketing media," DeBiase said. Generating your own leads or buying them from aggregators aren't your only options. Companies like Ingenio and LeadQual help their clients use the Internet to generate phone calls from prospective customers.

Ross Weinstein, Ingenio's director of sales and business development, said the company is geared for the estimated 13.8 million businesses that either don't have a Web site, or whose Internet presence is limited to "brochure ware" marketing, rather than e-commerce. Ingenio uses an auction model. Clients pick the geographic area they are searching for leads in, the hours they want to take calls, and then place bids, paying for each call they receive.

"You do not have to worry about bidding for thousands of keywords, which if you don't have a lot of time can be unmanageable," Weinstein said. "That just means the call is working for these people," he said.

"They are converting, or they would not pay for the calls." LeadQual helps companies convert their online leads into sales by making sure they are handled quickly. When a potential customer fills out a form on your Web site,

"you can all but guarantee that person has filled out another form (at a competing site), and you're in a race to get in touch with the client," said co-founder Glenn Houck. In real estate, only 52 percent of Internet leads actually get called, he said, and of those, only 62 percent get a call the same day, he said.

"Leads are falling through the cracks, and response times are slow," Houck said. LeadQual employs operators who call Internet leads within minutes, qualifying them and "hot-swapping" calls to clients' sales staff along with the information needed to close a sale.

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Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It's the age old saying that encourages you to mitigate your risk by spreading yourself out instead of relying on one thing only. Ask any stock broker and they'll tell you putting all your money in one company is very risky and is rarely the right move. When you only rely on one source, if something bad should happen you have nothing else to fall back on. At the end of the day, most people would agree this is basic common sense.

Enter the Google era, where many webmasters seem to have tossed this conventional logic aside in favour of a Google-tunnel-vision. It is true that Google is the most popular search engine in the world today reaching 380 million unique users per month. According to ComScore Media Metrix they have a 42.3% share of the search market. These numbers should make webmasters stand up and pay attention, but it should not make them neglect everything else.

Many SEOs (search engine optimizers) will exclusively talk about obtaining a high ranking in Google, as if that is the one and only way to drive traffic on the web. Other SEOs see the web in a larger sense and, instead, treat Google as one piece of the puzzle (albeit an important piece). The good SEOs recognize that while most searches may originate at Google, there are a lot of potential website visitors and customers coming from other engines that deserve some attention too. Fortunately, many of the search engines determine the importance of a site using similar criteria, so optimizing for one engine should give you a boost in all the others as well. But if your SEO is giving you ranking reports that only say Google, it may be time to start asking where you rank in the other engines. After all, no webmaster is prepared to say that a customer coming from a website other than Google is a customer they don't want!

List Yourself in Web Directories

Your website traffic and customers can come from all over, so you want to make sure that wherever customers looking, they'll find you. There are a lot of different web directories on the Internet. Some catalogue all sorts of sites, while others focus on a particular niche market. By taking just a little bit of time you can launch a web directory campaign that gets you listed in all the directories your potential visitors may use. Best of all, many web directories will let you submit your site for free, so this is a cost-effective way to generate targeted traffic. The best directories are those that offer a direct link back to your site. This way, your directory campaign also becomes a link-building campaign, and you boost your ranking on most search engines, including Google. (Two birds with one stone, not too shabby!)

Find Those Niche Sites

The web was built based on links. It's how web surfers move from one site to another, following an endless flow of information. You need to take advantage of this by making sure that your site is linked to along this path. If you are selling t-shirts, try to find a site that is dedicated to the topic of t-shirts (or fashion, in this instance). In this day and age, you are almost guaranteed to find a site with t-shirt resources. Look for ways you can generate a link to your site from theirs. If you have some marketing dollars to spend, you may be able to buy text or banner advertising, which will also provide a link back to your site. You can send a quick, polite email to the webmaster requesting to trade links (after all, that sites wants links too!), or maybe you can contribute content somehow and include a link to your site in your author bio. There are a lot of different approaches you can take, and as long as you end up getting a link to your site, you'll increase the likelihood of attracting visitors who are following that information path.

The world wide web is a big place and it's only getting bigger. You should devote a good amount of resources to the more important traffic drivers, like Google, but you should not fall into a trap where that's the only thing you can rely on. By diversifying your incoming traffic resources and listing yourself in web directories, you will be better prepared for what the future may bring.

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The first step in the process of most practitioners of search engine optimization is keyword research. This is often an iterative process in which the site owner and presumably industry expert works together with an SEO in order to determine which keywords and phrases to target for high rankings. Although to many this would seem like a very introductory level topic, the fact is that keyword research can make or break a campaign when it comes to determining actual success. Choosing the right keywords will lead to rankings that produce legitimate traffic, as opposed to rankings for terms that may have lots of "competition," but little "action."

A few threads going on at various forums currently are discussing keyword research. At High Rankings Forums, a member complains of - yes I know - high rankings in Google and Yahoo!, but no traffic. A couple of good recommendations follow.

At Search Engine Watch Forums, an interesting discussion about measuring keyword competition is happening, with the conversation seemingly helping to dispel some myths about degree of difficulty estimation. One of the classic discussions on keyword competitiveness can be found at the HighRankings Forum's Keyword Research category. A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums discusses the concept/alleged importance of keyword density.

Not sure if you are targeting the right keywords for your SEO initiative? Check out any of the above threads. If you know of more good ones, feel free to post them in the comments.

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